Unit 1
NATIVE VOICES
Resistance and Renewal in American Indian Literature
Authors and Works
Featured in the Video:
Luci Tapahonso, “They Are Silent and Quick,” “A
Breeze Swept Through” (poetry)
Simon J. Ortiz, “My Mother and My Sisters,”
“8:50 AM Ft. Lyons VAH” (poetry)
Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony (novel), Storyteller
(short stories, poetry, photography)
Discussed in This Unit:
Louise Erdrich, “Fleur” (short story)
Chippewa songs (songs)
Black Elk and John G. Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks
(autobiography)
Ghost Dance songs (songs)
Stories of the Beginning of the World (oral narrative)
Roger Williams, A Key into the Language of America
(language primer)
Thomas Harriot, A Brief and True Report of the New
Found Land of Virginia (ethnographic report)
■ How are Native American oral traditions
shaped by the landscapes in which they are composed?
■ What role does the land play in oral tradition?
■ How does the notion of time in American
Indian narratives compare with notions of time in
Western cultures?
■ How does the chronology of particular narratives reflect differing notions of time?
■ How do Yellow Woman stories and the Nightway or Enemyway chant influence Leslie Marmon
Silko’s Ceremony and Storyteller?
■ How do Navajo chantways influence the poetry
of Luci Tapahonso?
■ How does the Ghost Dance influence the vision
of Black Elk?
■ How does the Ghost Dance challenge nineteenthcentury European American notions of Manifest
Destiny?
■ How do Yellow Woman stories subvert the
genre of captivity narratives?
■ How do the poems of Simon J. Ortiz challenge
the notion of what it means to be an American hero?
Overview Questions
■ What is the relationship between Native
American identity and American identity?
■ How does Native American literature reflect or
help create a sense of what it means to be Native
American in the United States?
■ What does this literature help reveal about the
experience of having a multicultural identity?
■ How does the conception of American Indian
identity depend upon the writer’s identity?
■ What is Native American literature?
■ What makes Native American traditions from
different regions distinctive?
■ How has Native American literature been influenced by politics on and off the reservation?
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Learning Objectives
After students have viewed the video, read the headnotes and literary selections in The Norton Anthology of American Literature, and explored related
archival materials on the American Passages Web
site, they should be able to
1. identify some of the genres, meanings, and
purposes of American Indian oral narrative and
song;
2. recognize the ways in which contemporary
American Indian writers draw upon and transform the oral tradition in their written texts;
3. generalize about typical themes, concerns, and
narrative forms in contemporary American Indian literature;
4. compare the migration legends and creation
myths of the European explorers and the Iroquois and Pima Indians;
5. sketch out some differences between the values,
beliefs, and assumptions of Native North Americans and Europeans at the time of first contact
during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Instructor Overview
Native American traditions are rich and varied.
There are over five hundred Native American languages, each one as different as English is from
Arabic and as Arabic is from Swahili. Each Indian
nation has its own myths, its own histories, its own
personal stories. As Native American author N.
Scott Momaday writes, “The voices are all around
us, the three voices. You have the mythic and the
historical and the personal and then they become
a wheel, they revolve, they alternate. . . . Myth
becomes history becomes memoir becomes myth.”
What unites these Native American cultures? What
does it mean to study American Indian literature?
To answer these questions is to begin to consider
what it means to be American and Native American
simultaneously.
The definition of Native American literature is
closely tied to what people think constitutes the
essence of Native American identity. Three views
stand out in this highly contested debate: those of
legal bloodlines, cultural traditions, and bicultural
production. As literary critic Kenneth Lincoln notes,
one “working definition of ‘Indian,’ though criteria
vary from region to region, is minimally a quarter
blood and tribal membership”; Native American literature, then, would be those works written by
someone who legally is Native American, regardless
of their content or style. A second perspective links
Native American identity and literature with the
preservation of cultural traditions. Literary critics
who rely on this view focus on aspects of “traditional” Indian culture in contemporary American
Indian literature, such as the continuance of oral
traditions. A third trend in Native American studies
defines American Indian identity and literature not
in terms of what it preserves (whether it be blood or
culture), but rather as a bicultural mixture of Native
and European American people and traditions.
Some Native Americans have argued that since their
indigenous cultures have always assimilated aspects
of other cultures (including those of other American
Indians), to be Indian is to be bicultural, or multicultural.
Many American Indians define themselves not
primarily as “Native Americans” but as members of
a specific tribe. It is important as you read the
authors in this unit to remember that what you
know about the Navajo and their religious traditions
probably will not apply to the Chippewa, a people
geographically, linguistically, and culturally separate
from them. Some scholars have suggested, however,
that Native American communities within a particular geographic region tend to be culturally more
homologous because they are often from the same
language family and because cultures are often
shaped by the landscapes out of which they emerge.
There are several key regions in Native American
studies: the Southwest, Plains, California, Midwest,
Northeast, Northwest, South, and Southwest. The
video focuses on the Southwest; however, in the unit
you will find information about the other regions.
You will also find a balance between information
that is specific to the tribe of each author and information about qualities that are shared among American Indian peoples.
Oral traditions vary by region and tribe, and
scholars have tended to examine the influence of the
American Indian oral tradition upon contemporary
American Indian written literature in two ways:
(1) the content and (2) the style. When people
explore how the content of the American Indian oral
tradition has influenced contemporary literature,
they usually turn to the stories and songs of American Indian peoples. These stories tend to focus on
particular characters and to include standard events
and elements. Some of the most common tale-types
include gambler, trickster, creation, abduction, and
migration legends. Contemporary authors can use
these tale-types in their works: for example, Leslie
Marmon Silko’s Ceremony retells Yellow Woman stories—a Pueblo Abduction Cycle. In addition to looking at the content of the stories, scholars have
looked at the style of contemporary American
Indian literature to examine the influence of the oral
tradition. Oral style has been characterized as
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empathetic, participatory, situational, and reliant
on repetition. In the oral tradition, repetition is crucial both for ceremonial reasons and because it aids
in the process of memorization and provides narrative cohesion. To repeat words is also to wield a certain power. Perhaps most importantly, the oral tradition is tied to the land: as author and critic Greg
Sarris explains, “The landscape becomes the bible
and each stone, each mountain, each set of trees or
a river, or a section of the river becomes a text,
because they become a way of remembering stories,
and stories associated with that place.”
The video, the archive, and the curriculum materials situate the writers featured in Unit 1 within
several of the historical contexts and artistic movements that shaped their texts. Together, these
materials articulate the diverse genres and cultural
traditions that comprise and inform Native American literature.
Student Overview
Native American traditions are rich and varied.
There are over five hundred Native American languages, each one as different as English is from
Arabic and as Arabic is from Swahili. Each Indian
nation has its own myths, its own histories, its own
personal stories. As Native American author N.
Scott Momaday writes, “The voices are all around
us, the three voices. You have the mythic and the
historical and the personal and then they become
a wheel, they revolve, they alternate. . . . Myth
becomes history becomes memoir becomes myth.”
What unites these Native American cultures? What
does it mean to study American Indian literature?
To answer these questions is to begin to consider
what it means to be American and Native American
simultaneously.
The definition of Native American literature is
closely tied to what people think constitutes the
essence of Native American identity. Three views
stand out in this highly contested debate: those of
legal bloodlines, cultural traditions, and bicultural
production. As literary critic Kenneth Lincoln
notes, one “working definition of ‘Indian,’ though
criteria vary from region to region, is minimally a
quarter blood and tribal membership”; Native
American literature, then, would be those works
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V O I C E S
written by someone who legally is Native American,
regardless of their content or style. A second perspective links Native American identity and literature with the preservation of cultural traditions.
Literary critics who rely on this view focus on
aspects of “traditional” Indian culture in contemporary American Indian literature, such as the continuance of oral traditions. A third trend in Native
American studies defines American Indian identity
and literature not in terms of what it preserves
(whether it be blood or culture), but rather as a
bicultural mixture of Native and European American people and traditions. Some Native Americans
have argued that since their indigenous cultures
have always assimilated aspects of other cultures
(including those of other American Indians), to be
Indian is to be bicultural, or multicultural.
Many American Indians define themselves not
primarily as “Native Americans” but as members of
a specific tribe. It is important as you read the
authors in this unit to remember that what you
know about the Navajo and their religious traditions probably will not apply to the Chippewa, a
people geographically, linguistically, and culturally
separate from them. Some scholars have suggested,
however, that Native American communities within
a particular geographic region tend to be culturally
more homologous because they are often from the
same language family and because cultures are
often shaped by the landscapes out of which they
emerge. There are several key regions in Native
American studies: the Southwest, Plains, California,
Midwest, Northeast, Northwest, South, and Southwest. The video focuses on the Southwest; however,
in the unit you will find information about the other
regions. You will also find a balance between information that is specific to the tribe of each author
and information about qualities that are shared
among American Indian peoples.
Oral traditions vary by region and tribe, and
scholars have tended to examine the influence of the
American Indian oral tradition upon contemporary
American Indian written literature in two ways:
(1) the content and (2) the style. When people
explore how the content of the American Indian oral
tradition has influenced contemporary literature,
they usually turn to the stories and songs of American Indian peoples. These stories tend to focus
on particular characters and to include standard
events and elements. Some of the most common
tale-types include gambler, trickster, creation,
abduction, and migration legends. Contemporary
authors can use these tale-types in their works: for
example, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony retells
Yellow Woman stories—a Pueblo abduction cycle. In
addition to looking at the content of the stories,
scholars have looked at the style of contemporary
American Indian literature to examine the influence
of the oral tradition. Oral style has been characterized as empathetic, participatory, situational, and
reliant on repetition. In the oral tradition, repetition
is crucial both for ceremonial reasons and because it
aids in the process of memorization and provides
narrative cohesion. To repeat words is also to wield a
certain power. Perhaps most importantly, the oral
tradition is tied to the land: as author and critic Greg
Sarris explains, “The landscape becomes the bible
and each stone, each mountain, each set of trees or a
river, or a section of the river becomes a text, because
they become a way of remembering stories, and stories associated with that place.”
The video, the archive, and the curriculum materials situate the writers featured in Unit 1 within
several of the historical contexts and artistic movements that shaped their texts. Together, these materials articulate the diverse genres and cultural
traditions that comprise and inform Native American literature.
Video Overview
➣ Authors covered: Luci Tapahonso (Navajo), Simon J.
Ortiz (Acoma Pueblo), Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna
Pueblo)
➣ Who’s interviewed: Greg Sarris, author, professor of
English (Loyola Marymount University) (Miwok chief)
(Pomo); N. Scott Momaday, author (Kiowa); Simon J.
Ortiz, author (Acoma Pueblo); Paula Gunn Allen, author,
professor of English (University of California, Los Angeles)
(Laguna Pueblo/Sioux); Joy Harjo, poet/musician, professor of English (University of California, Los Angeles)
(Muscogee/Creek); Rex Lee Jim, author (Navajo)
➣ Points covered:
• American Indian oral traditions link people to the culture, myths, and land. Traditionally, the oral storyteller
is a human individual who relates the mythological to
others. Contemporary American Indian written literature draws on oral traditions even as it translates them
into European forms. These stories are necessary for
the culture to survive in the era after European contact. A kind of “cultural contact,” this written literature
deals with the interaction of Native and European cultures and identities. This video focuses on three Native
American writers from the Southwest: Luci Tapahonso
(Navajo), Simon J. Ortiz (Acoma Pueblo), and Leslie
Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo).
• Luci Tapahonso’s poems “They Are Silent and Quick”
and “A Breeze Swept Through” draw on and are a
product of Navajo language, tradition, and landscape.
• Simon J. Ortiz’s writing reflects a renewed transmis-
sion of Acoma Pueblo cultural memory, as in “My
Mother and Sister.” It also conveys the often fractured
and besieged state of being a Native American today,
as in his poem “8:50 AM Ft. Lyons VAH.” These
poems reflect the bicultural world of contemporary
Native Americans.
• Like “8:50 AM Ft. Lyons VAH,” Leslie Marmon Silko’s
novel Ceremony deals with the post–World War II
experience of Native Americans. The novel attempts
to reintegrate the shattered experience of its protagonist, Tayo, with the old stories and worldviews. The
Laguna ceremonies must be adapted to cope with the
current world, or else the old ways will die. In Storyteller, Silko demonstrates the ways in which language
does not merely reflect the world, but can directly
affect it.
• Native American literature is particular to tribal people in its invocation of the concrete power of language to heal and guide, but it is also like all
American literature in probing what it means to be
American.
PREVIEW
Preview the video: Contemporary American Indian
writers creatively employ and adapt native traditions even
as they address contemporary American Indian life, and
therefore American life in general. Luci Tapahonso,
Simon J. Ortiz, and Leslie Marmon Silko are three writers
who draw on their different southwestern native heritages
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Video Overview (continued)
to keep the old ideas and cultures alive in the form of
new, relevant stories.
• What to think about while watching: What are some
of the characteristics of Navajo and Pueblo oral traditions? In what sense do these writers draw on native oral
traditions and beliefs? How do they speak to the experience of being American Indian? What does their written
literature hope to do or achieve?
• Tying the video to the unit content: What are some
specific Navajo or Pueblo oral traditions or beliefs that
you can see reflected in the written literature of these writers? What do these writers seem to be doing, or trying to
say, by employing these traditions? How does Native
American history, and the history of the contact between
natives and Europeans, affect their contemporary writing? How are their texts a combination of Native American and European literary traditions?
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS FOR THE VIDEO
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What is an American? How
does American literature create
conceptions of the American
experience and identity?
What is American literature?
What are its distinctive voices
and styles? How do social and
political issues influence the
American canon?
How do place and time shape
literature and our understanding of it?
Comprehension
Questions
What are some differences
between traditional Native
American and European ways of
seeing the world?
What are some elements of the
“oral tradition”? What are some
of the ways in which traditional
Native American and European
storytellers might differ? What
social issues appear in Silko’s
Ceremony?
What part of the United States are
Tapahonso, Ortiz, and Silko from?
What tribe is each writer from?
What part does World War II play
in Silko’s Ceremony?
Context
Questions
How do elements of a specifically
Native American worldview inform
the work of the writers featured in
the video?
How do the contemporary writers
featured in the video draw on the
oral tradition in their works?
How do the tribe, landscape, and
environment with which each
writer is familiar affect his or her
work?
Exploration
Questions
How much do you know about
Native American history and culture? To what extent is it important
for non–Native Americans to
know these traditions? What do
you gain by learning about them?
What would you lose if you didn’t
know them?
What topics, styles, or ideas would
you expect to see in a contemporary Native American written text?
How do you imagine the text
might differ from—and be similar
to—literary works written by
Americans with European,
African, or Asian heritages?
Would the absence of typically
Native American concerns in a
book by a Native American affect
your judgment of that book?
Why do you think it might be
important for these writers to
incorporate the specifics of their
own time and place into their
texts? What would be lost if
they did not incorporate such
elements?
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TIMELINE
Texts
Contexts
1490s
Columbus lands in the Bahamas, returns to Spain
with first Indian slaves (1492)
1500s
Geographer Martin Waldseemüller names the
“new” land “America” for Vespucci (1507)
1510s
Spanish Laws of Burgos forbid enslavement of
Indians and advocate Christian conversion
(1512)
1550s
Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex
(c. 1558–85)
1580s
Thomas Harriot, A Brief and True Report of the New
Found Land of Virginia (1588)
1590s
1600s
Spanish begin settling New Mexico (1582)
First Spanish colony on the Rio Grande, establishing
control over Pueblo Indians (1598)
Garcilaso de la Vega, The Florida of the Inca (1605)
1620s
First Indian uprising in an English colony: Powhatan
Confederacy attacks Jamestown (1622)
1630s
Pequot War (1637)
1640s
Roger Williams, A Key into the Language of America
(1643)
1670s
King Philip’s War decimates native tribes in New
England (1675–78)
1700s
Approximately fourteen hundred Indian slaves in
the North American colonies (1708)
1750s
French and Indian War establishes English possession of Northeast (1755–63)
1760s
Samson Occom, A Short Narrative of My Life (1768)
Pontiac’s War (1763–75)
1770s
Continental Congress establishes first treaty with
Indian tribe, the Delaware (1778)
1780s
Northwest Ordinance approved by Confederation
Congress (1787)
T I M E L I N E
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TIMELINE (continued)
Texts
Contexts
1790s
Congress enacts first law regulating trade and land
sales with Indians (1790)
1810s
War of 1812, the last war in which Indians fight
with a foreign colonial power against the United
States (1812–14)
First appropriation by Congress of a fund ($10,000)
to “civilize” the Indians (1819)
1820s
Cherokee Memorials (1829–30)
Bureau of Indian Affairs established (1824)
Cherokee Nation ratifies its new constitution
(1827–28)
1830s
William Apess, “An Indian’s Looking-Glass for the
White Man” (1833)
Congress passes Indian Removal Act, legalizing
removal of eastern Indians to west of the
Mississippi (1830)
Cherokees travel the Trail of Tears (1838–39)
1840s
Mexican War; Southwest is ceded to the United
States (1846–48)
Bureau of Indian Affairs shifts from War Department
to the Department of the Interior (1849)
California Gold Rush (1849)
1850s
John Rollin Ridge (Yellow Bird), The Life and
Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, the Celebrated
California Bandit (1854)
1860s
Standing Bear court case establishes that Indians are
“persons within the meaning of the law” (1868)
1870s
Cochise, “[I am alone]” (1872)
Charlot, “[He has filled graves with our bones]”
(1876)
Lorenzo Asisara, “Punishment”’ (1877, 1890)
1880s
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United States war against Plains Indians (1854)
Congress appropriates first sum earmarked for federal administration of Indian education (1870)
Congress passes a law putting an end to further
treaties with Indian tribes (1871)
General Custer and his Seventh Cavalry defeated
by Sioux and Cheyenne in Battle of Little Big
Horn (1876)
Congress appropriates first funds for Indian police
(1878)
Carlisle Indian School founded (1879)
Geronimo and his band of Apaches captured, ending Indian fighting in Southwest (1886)
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TIMELINE (continued)
Texts
Contexts
Dawes Severalty (General Allotment) Act redistributes tribally held lands (1887)
Paiute Wovoka inaugurates Ghost Dance religion
(1889)
1890s
Franz Boas, Chinook Texts (1894)
James Mooney, The Ghost Dance Religion and the
Sioux Outbreak of 1890 (1896)
1900s
Zitkala Ša (Gertrude Simmons Bonnin),
“Impressions of an Indian Childhood,” “The
School Days of an Indian Girl,” “An Indian
Teacher among Indians” (1900)
1910s
Frances Densmore, Chippewa Songs (1910)
Selin Williams, “The Bungling Host” (1910)
Charles Alexander Eastman, From the Deep Woods
to Civilization (1916)
Congress makes all Indians U.S. citizens and grants
them the right to vote (1924)
1920s
1930s
Massacre of nearly 300 Indians at Wounded Knee
ends Indian resistance to U.S. government (1890)
Curtis Act dissolves tribal governments (1898)
Black Elk and John G. Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks
(1932)
Ella Cara Deloria, Dakota Texts (1932)
Mourning Dove, Coyote Stories (1933)
D’arcy McNickle, The Surrounded
Congress passes Wheeler-Howard (Indian
Reorganization) Act, ending Dawes era (1934)
Founding of National Congress of American Indians
(1944)
Congress establishes Indian Claims Commission to
judge all tribal claims (1946)
1940s
1950s
Paul Radin, The Trickster (1956)
1960s
Hugh Yellowman, “Coyote, Skunk, and the Prairie
Dogs” (1966)
N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain
(1969)
Alexander Posey, Poems of Alexander Lawrence
Posey, Creek Indian Bard (1969)
Congress adopts House Concurrent Resolution 180,
declaring its intent to terminate treaty relations
with Indian tribes (1953)
T I M E L I N E
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TIMELINE (continued)
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Texts
Contexts
1970s
Vine Deloria, God Is Red (1973)
John Bierhorst, Four Masterworks of American Indian
Literature: Quetzalcoatl, The Ritual of Condolence,
Cuceb, the Night Chant (1974)
Simon J. Ortiz, Poems from the Veterans Hospital
(1977)
Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony (1977)
American Indian Movement members occupy
Wounded Knee and battle FBI agents (1973)
1980s
Joy Harjo, She Had Some Horses (1983)
Louise Erdrich, “Fleur” (1986)
Paula Gunn Allen, The Sacred Hoop (1986)
Luci Tapahonso, A Breeze Swept Through (1989)
1990s
Joy Harjo, In Mad Love and War (1990)
Gerald Vizenor, Landfill Meditations: Crossblood
Stories (1991)
Simon J. Ortiz, Woven Stone (1992)
Luci Tapahonso, Saanii Dahataal: The Women Are
Singing (1993)
Greg Sarris, Mabel McKay: Weaving the Dream
(1994)
Joy Harjo, The Woman Who Fell from the Sky (1994)
Diane Glancy, Firesticks (1993)
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Congress passes Native American Graves Protection
and Repatriation Act, protecting Indian remains
and sacred objects (1990)
AUTHOR/TEXT REVIEW
Luci Tapahonso (b. 1953)
A Navajo woman born in Shiprock, New Mexico, Luci Tapahonso grew
up on a farm within the largest Indian reservation in the United States.
For the Navajo, or Dine, as they call themselves, kinship and lineage
define one’s sense of self: Tapahonso’s father was from the Bitter Water
clan, her mother from the Salt Water clan. Tapahonso emphasizes the
importance of her family to her craft: “When I write I can always hear
their voices and I can hear the way that they would talk and just the
beauty of how they structured stories and their expressions and their
faces. So, my primary literary influence has been my family and my
relatives.”
Tapahonso’s first language is Dine, the Navajo language, and Dine
frequently appears in her poetry. Indeed, she often conceives, writes,
and sings her poems entirely in Dine, translating them into English
only for publication. This practice highlights the typical Native
American conception of literature as performative, living, and inextricably linked to the specifics of culture, language, and place. For the
Navajo, Tapahonso explains, language is powerful: “[The Navajo] say
that when a child is born . . . the first breath they take is a holy thing,
that it means that the power of the winds in the air that make up the
universe are a part of you so that when you breathe you can actually
feel your breath; that means that there’s a sense of the holy imbued in
you. So that each time you say something then . . . you can change
things. . . . You can change the course of whatever it is that you’re
going to do.” She goes on to explain that this belief in the efficacy of
language makes all of the Dine careful speakers: “There’s not really a
way to say . . . you’re sorry so . . . people have to be very careful about
what they say and . . . you understand that words do have power and
that you have the power to create or . . . the power to destroy. You have
the power to heal, to comfort, to make people laugh.” For the Dine,
the poet or wordsmith has a special status. Tapahonso notes, “A person that speaks beautifully is thought to have . . . a really good
upbringing . . . a lot of people [having] loved them, a lot of people [having] invested in them to make sure that they speak well. . . .”
Tapahonso received her B.A. and M.A. in 1980 and 1983, respectively, from the University of New Mexico, where she studied under
Leslie Marmon Silko. She has taught as an assistant professor of
English at the University of New Mexico and the University of Kansas,
Lawrence, and currently teaches at the University of Arizona. Her
books of poetry include A Breeze Swept Through (1989), Saanii
Dahataal: The Women are Singing (1993) (in which “They Are Silent
and Quick” appears), and Blue Horses Rush In (1997). In the preface
to Saanii Dahataal, Tapahonso writes of two literary issues that appear
as concerns for many other American Indian writers. First, she notes
the centrality of storytelling to Indian life: “There is such a love of stories among Navajo people that it seems each time a group of more
than two gather, the dialogue eventually evolves into sharing stories
and memories, laughing, teasing. To be included in this way is a dis-
Nancy Crampton, Luci
Tapahonso (1980–2002), courtesy of
Nancy Crampton.
[6157]
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Department of the Interior,
Bureau of Indian Affairs, Navajo
Shiprock Fair Exhibit (c. 1934), courtesy
of Pacific Alaska Region, National
Archives and Records Administration.
This fair, held every year in Shiprock,
New Mexico, is the oldest fair in the
Navajo Nation. Luci Tapahonso was
born in Shiprock; her recent book,
Songs of Shiprock Fair, describes one
child’s experiences at the fair.
[5959] Terry Eiler, Sheepherding on the
Grounds of the Utah International Mine
on the Navajo Reservation (1972), courtesy of Still Pictures Branch, National
Archives and Records Administration.
Luci Tapahonso, the middle child in a
family of eleven, grew up in this area.
Tapahonso is a Navajo who composes
much of her poetry in her native language, Dine.
[6157] Nancy Crampton, Luci
Tapahonso (1980–2002), courtesy of
Nancy Crampton. Altering, adapting,
and drawing from the Dine (Navajo)
oral tradition, poet Luci Tapahonso
carves out a space in American literature for a diverse yet distinctly native
voice.
[6158] Nancy Crampton, Ortiz, Silko,
Tapahonso Group Photo (n.d.), courtesy
of Nancy Crampton. All three of these
prominent Native American writers come
from New Mexico. Each shares the traditional Native American emphasis on
storytelling, and each emphasizes the
importance of developing a respectful
relationship with the land.
[6533] Kenji Kawano, Navajo
Grandson, Grandma, Horse (2001),
courtesy of Kenji Kawano. A young
Navajo man stands with his arm around
his grandmother. Herself a Navajo, Luci
Tapahonso draws inspiration for her
work from the lives of those she knows
best and from the landscape of the
Southwest.
[6590] Joel Grimes, Traditional Navajo
Dancing during Fourth of July Fair
(1992), courtesy of Joel Grimes. The
Navajo have a long tradition of dancing. Navajo Luci Tapahonso attempts to
tell the history of her people’s culture in
her writings and to contextualize it in
terms of the present.
[5957]
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tinct way of showing affection and appreciation for each other.”
Tapahonso’s words highlight the way in which stories are an essential
aspect of maintaining Indian culture. Second, she de-emphasizes herself as a singular creative voice, as the “author” of her poems in the
traditional Western sense. Rather, her writing is itself part of the web
of an old culture—as is Tapahonso herself—and works toward the continual renewal of that culture. As Tapahonso explains, “Like many
other relatives, [my paternal grandmother] had a profound understanding of the function of language. This writing, then, is not ‘mine,’
but a collection of many voices that range from centuries ago and continue into the future.”
Tapahonso has served on the board of directors at the Phoenix
Indian Center, has been a member of the New Mexico Arts Commission Literature Panel, and has been on the steering committees of the
Returning the Gift Writers Festival, the Kansas Arts Commission
Literature Panel, the Phoenix Arts Commission, and the Telluride
Institute Writers Forum Advisory Board. She was also the commissioner of the Kansas Arts Commission.
T E A C H I N G
T I P S
■ The number 4 is important for Tapahonso’s verse. As Tapahonso
points out in her American Passages interview, many Navajo songs
have four stanzas and ceremonies are structured in fours, as are many
ordinary things. Play the excerpt from Tapahonso’s interview in which
she elaborates on the significance of the number 4, and then have your
students read one of her poems that uses repetitions of 4. What meaning does the number bring to the poem?
■ Show your students the segment on the Navajo Reservation from
the documentary Winds of Change: A Matter of Promises, narrated by
N. Scott Momaday. How do the Navajo strategies for adapting to cultural change compare to the strategies used by Tapahonso? This segment of the video, which introduces Navajo veterans and chantways,
is also useful to set up Ortiz and Silko’s work.
■ The traditional Navajo dwelling is called the hogan and is constructed out of earth and wooden poles according to instructions given
from Talking God. Hogans are a good way to introduce students to
some of the basic principles of Navajo oral tradition and chantways;
as anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu reflects, the house is “a microcosm
organized according to the same oppositions which govern all the
universe.” The entrances to hogans always face east. As Tapahonso
explains, “In Navajo thinking everything begins in the East. So the
beginning of day, the beginning of life . . . is seen as being situated in
the East. The hogan given by Talking God is also the home of Dawn
Woman, or Changing Woman, wife of the sun.” Have students look at
the image of the hogan in the archive. How is it different from a
Western-style house? How does it reflect the values in the poem
“A Breeze Swept Through”? Students may also enjoy “Starlore,”
Tapahonso’s poem about a hogan, from Blue Horses Rush In.
Q U E S T I O N S
Comprehension: The location of a poem or story—its setting—almost
always conveys important information about its overall meaning. Where does “They Are Silent and Quick” seem to be set? Where
are the narrator and her daughter, and where are the narrator’s
parents?
Comprehension: “A Breeze Swept Through” retells a Navajo creation
story. Who or what is the “first born of Dawn Woman”?
Comprehension: What is the significance of the narrator’s Navajo
mother saying, “ ‘There’s nothing like that in Navajo stories’ ” in the
third stanza of “They Are Silent and Quick”? How does this statement affect the narrator, her “aching,” and her feelings about constituting one of three generations of women in her family? What do
these emotions have to do with the setting of the poem?
Context: Why would Tapahonso compare dawn with birth in “A
Breeze Swept Through”? What does her comparison suggest about
the place of humans in the natural world?
Context: In Language and Art in the Navajo Universe, anthropologist
Gary Witherspoon argues that for the Navajo, “the earth and its lifegiving, life-sustaining, and life-producing qualities are associated
with and derived from Changing Woman [Earth Mother]. It is not
surprising, therefore, that women tend to dominate in social and
economic affairs. Women are the heads of most domestic groups,
the clans are matrilineal [i.e., they trace their descent through the
maternal line], and the land and sheep traditionally were controlled
by the women of residential groups.” What role do women play in
Tapahonso’s poetry?
Exploration: The narrator of “They Are Silent and Quick” says, “There
are no English words to describe this feeling.” What do you think
she means by this statement? At what point in her narrative does
she switch from English? That is, where do the “breaks” occur in
her English consciousness? You might compare these moments to
when Gloria Anzaldúa (Unit 2), for example, switches to Spanish,
or when writers like Jean Toomer (Unit 10) switch dialects.
Exploration: The Navajo is a matrifocal society; that is, in certain
ways the community revolves around women (for example, families tend to reside with the mother’s clan). In “A Breeze Swept
Through,” images of the female are vital to the force of the poem.
Why is the poem gendered female? Would you describe the poem
as empowering to women, especially Native American women?
Why or why not?
Exploration: Compare the Navajo creation story in “A Breeze Swept
Through” to the creation story in Genesis. How are humans characterized in each? How is the divine characterized? What are the relationships between the human and the divine in each story?
[6850] Edward S. Curtis, Head-andShoulders Portrait of Navajo Woman,
Facing Front (1904), courtesy of the
Library of Congress [LC-USZ62103498]. This woman’s clothing is an
example of bicultural production: while
influenced by European dress, it also
incorporates a Navajo blanket influenced by the designs of baskets and
pottery. Sheep, who provide the wool for
blankets as well as a source of food, are
a crucial part of Navajo culture.
[8007] Luci Tapahonso, Reading: “They
are Silent and Quick” (2002), courtesy
of Annenberg/CBP and American
Passages. This poem shows (Dine)
Navajo poet Luci Tapahonso moving
between the English and Navajo
languages. In the poem, Tapahonso
discusses the importance of the oral tradition and storytelling.
[8963] Edward S. Curtis, Navajo Hogan
(1905), courtesy of the Library of
Congress [LC-USZ62-105863]. The
hogan, a traditional Navajo dwelling, is
constructed out of earth and wooden
poles according to instructions from
Talking God.
[9074] Luci Tapahonso, Reading: “A
Breeze Swept Through” (2002), courtesy
of Annenberg/CBP and American
Passages. This poem shows (Dine)
Navajo poet Luci Tapahonso moving
between the English and Navajo languages. In the poem, Tapahonso retells
the creation story of Dawn Woman.
[9080] Luci Tapahonso, Interview: “The
Number Four and Its Significance”
(2002), courtesy of Annenberg/CBP and
American Passages. A recording from
an interview with Tapahonso in which
she discusses the number 4 and its significance in her poetry and for the
Navajo; other interview excerpts can be
found in archive [9076] through [9083].
L U C I
TA PA H O N S O
13
Ansel Adams, Looking across
the Street toward Houses, “Acoma
Pueblo” (1933), courtesy of the National
Archives and Records Administration,
Still Pictures Branch.
[5887]
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Simon J. Ortiz (b. 1941)
Simon J. Ortiz’s world is one of mixtures and doublings, of multiple identities: he has an American
name and an Acoma name, Hihdruutsi; he is from
the Southwest but lives in Toronto, Canada. Born
and raised in the Acoma Pueblo community in
Albuquerque, New Mexico, Ortiz received his early
education from the Bureau of Indian Affairs school
on the Acoma reservation. He later attended the
University of New Mexico. Ortiz currently teaches
in the department of English at the University of
Toronto.
Storytelling has always been a part of his life. As
he explains, “I think that because storytelling is a
process, that is a dynamic of culture. . . . [I]t was with that first utterance of sound that your parents or those who are closest to you in your
family utter that first sound or that first word and you first conceive of
it as sound that has meaning. It could be a murmur, it could be a song,
it could be your name.” His poetry explores the significance of individual origins and journeys, which he, like many American Indian writers,
sees as forming a vital link in the continuity of life. Drawing on
American Indian oral traditions, his poems emphasize orality, narrative, and the actual worldly effects of language. As Ortiz explains, storytelling is about more than just the style of the poetry: “The purpose of
that story sharing or storytelling is . . . conversing, and the story listeners are conversing with us. We are sharing, or participating. And it’s the
storyteller participating by his telling, and the listener participating by
his or her listening. So it’s an exchange. It’s a dialogue. It’s an event.”
Ortiz’s poetry is also influenced by the sounds of the oral tradition
and by the way that he conjures up concrete images and uses repetition. His poems, therefore, feel like they are being transmitted through
the spoken word more than the written word. He has said that
“Indians always tell a story. . . . The only way to continue is to tell a
story and there is no other way. Your children will not survive unless
you tell something about them—how they were born, how they came
to this certain place, how they continued.” Ortiz advocates a political
literature, eschewing the idea that poetry should be above or beyond
political concerns. While this is less obviously true of the poems featured in the video, it is more evident in such poems as “At the
Salvation Army” (from From Sand Creek).
Perhaps most crucially, Ortiz’s poetry grows out of his experience
with the Pueblo landscape and the cultures that live with it. Like fellow Pueblo poet Leslie Marmon Silko, Ortiz expresses concern
through his work that Western worldviews treat the land as a property
to be used rather than as a life-force to be respected. Ortiz’s books of
poetry include Going for Rain (1976), Poems from the Veterans Hospital
(1977) (in which “8:50 AM Ft. Lyons VAH” appears), From Sand Creek
(1982), Woven Stone (1992) (in which “My Mother and My Sisters”
appears), After and Before the Lightning (1994), and Out There Somewhere (2002).
T E A C H I N G
T I P S
■ Most students have heard little first-hand testimony from veterans about their experiences with war. Have your students interview
veterans about their experiences, either veterans in their families or
those at local VA hospitals. They may want to read them the poems
that Ortiz has written and ask the veterans to comment on them.
■ Have your students write in their journals about some central
family memory or legend as in “My Mother and My Sisters.” What purpose does the dissemination and repetition of the story serve in their
family? Is this story community-forming? Confidence-building? If the
story is funny, as many such stories are, what purpose does the humor
serve?
■ In his interview with American Passages, Simon J. Ortiz reflects
that even though the Pueblo didn’t have a written language before the
arrival of the Spanish, they had “art forms and art objects, that communicated, that served as expressions of knowledge.” Ask your students to focus on the image of the women creating pottery in “My
Mother and My Sisters.” What linguistic strategies does Ortiz use to
let us know that what the women are doing is more important than
just throwing and painting pottery?
Q U E S T I O N S
Comprehension: What is “the building” in “8:50 AM Ft. Lyons VAH”?
To which “three American wars” does the narrator probably refer?
Comprehension: The narrator of “My Mother and My Sisters” says
that his mother paints “with movements whose origin has only to
do with years of knowing.” What does this description mean?
Comprehension: What is the relationship between the building and
the geese in “8:50 AM Ft. Lyons VAH”? What does Ortiz seem to be
saying by including them both in one brief poem?
Context: The VA Hospital in Albuquerque is located on over 500 acres
on a high mesa and is designed in a village layout in SpanishPueblo architectural style.What is the significance of the architecture of the hospital in Ortiz’s poem? What difference would it have
made if the building were built in a style that imitated a pueblo or a
kiva, the traditional site of Pueblo healing?
Context: “My Mother and My Sisters” includes two segments, the narrator’s description of his mother and sister making pottery, and his
mother telling the story of looking for pinons. What do these two
segments have in common, or how do they illuminate each other?
Consider the relationship between pottery-making and story-telling
as art forms: how do they both involve the expression and transmission of cultural values and assumptions?
Context: Examine the jars from Acoma and Santo Domingo Pueblos
featured in the “Singing Mothers” Web Archive in this unit. Describe the shape of the jars. What potential uses might they have
had? How has the potter used shape and geometry to create a sense
of balance and rhythm? Compare the harmony-seeking principles
in the pottery to those in Ortiz’s poems.
O R T I Z
W E B
A R C H I V E
Ansel Adams, “Church, Acoma
Pueblo” Corner View Showing Mostly
Left Wall (1933), courtesy of National
Archives and Records Administration.
The Acoma Pueblo community of Albuquerque, New Mexico, was the childhood home of poet Simon J. Ortiz.
Ortiz’s poetry deals with political concerns and bears the marks of his oral
heritage.
[5887] Ansel Adams, Looking across the
Street toward Houses, “Acoma Pueblo”
(1933), courtesy of the National
Archives and Records Administration,
Still Pictures Branch. Acoma Pueblo, the
home of the Acoma Indians, is believed
to be the oldest inhabited village in the
United States. Atop a 367-foot mesa,
this “Sky City” is well defended against
enemies. Dwellings are built around a
plaza that serves as the community’s
sacred center. The interconnectedness of
the houses reflects the social bonds of
the community.
[5891] Henry Kyllingstad, Daisy Pino,
an Acoma Girl, during On-the-Job
Training at Brown’s Cafe, Albuquerque,
N. Mex. (1951), courtesy of National
Archives and Records Administration.
During the 1950s poor living conditions
and high unemployment led many
Native Americans to seek work off the
reservation in cities. N. Scott Momaday,
Sherman Alexie, and others write about
the hardships and alienation experienced by “urban Indians.”
[5971] Nancy Crampton, Simon Ortiz
Portrait (n.d.), courtesy of Nancy
Crampton. Simon J. Ortiz was born
in the Acoma Pueblo community, to
the Dyaamih clan. In Ortiz’s native
language there are no words for
extended family members; everyone is
either “father,” “mother,” “sister” or
“brother.”
[8304] Simon Ortiz, Pottery in Acoma
Pueblo Culture (2002), courtesy of
Annenberg Media andAmerican
Passages. Pueblo pottery is considered
some of the most beautiful, and it has
deep ties to storytelling traditions. In this
excerpt from a poem by Simon Ortiz, we
learn of the power of pottery in Acoma
Pueblo culture: “That’s the thing about
making dhyuuni; / it has more to do
[5876]
S I M O N
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O R T I Z
15
with a sense of touching / than with seeing because fingers / have to know the
texture of clay . . .”
Rudi Williams, Korean War
Army Veteran Ted Wood, an Abenaki
Indian, in Full Dress Uniform (1998),
courtesy of DefenseLINK News, U.S.
Department of Defense.
[6113]
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Exploration: Poetry often invokes the five senses in order to make its
message more vivid and immediate. There are two senses at work
in “8:50 AM Ft. Lyons VAH”: the Wisconsin horse’s sighting of the
geese and the sound the geese make. What is the relationship
between sound and sight in the poem? What does the persona
reflect on when he hears, and what does he reflect on when he sees?
Which is more “healing”? Compare Ortiz’s use of sensory impressions to that of other contemporary poets such as Li-Young Lee and
Sylvia Plath.
Exploration: Poetry is often addressed to an audience—a “you.” The
second, brief stanza of “My Mother and My Sisters” is written in
the second person—that is, it is addressed to some “you.” Who is
this audience? What is the relationship between the reader and the
narrator as a result of this pronoun? How does the second stanza
affect your understanding of the poem? How does its inclusion support Ortiz’s claim that poetry is a “dialogue” or “conversation”? You
might contrast Ortiz’s use of the pronoun “you” to that of other
poets in such poems as “Daddy” by Sylvia Plath and “Black Art” by
Amiri Baraka.
Leslie Marmon Silko (b. 1948)
Leslie Marmon Silko was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in the
house where her father was also born. She grew up in Old Laguna, a
town formed several centuries ago by Pueblo tribes. Her family is of
mixed descent, with Plains Indian, Mexican, and European ancestors.
She has both Laguna and white ancestors on her father’s side and
Plains tribe blood from her mother’s side. Even the Laguna part of her
heritage is multicultural: Hopi, Jemez, Zuni, Navajo, and Spanish peoples have influenced its culture and oral traditions. Like Louise
Erdrich, Silko explores mixed identity in many of her works, particularly the situation of being “neither white nor fully traditional Indian.”
Silko received her B.A. from the University of New Mexico—graduating magna cum laude in 1969—and after three semesters of law school
decided instead to become a teacher and a writer. She published
Laguna Woman, a collection of poems, in 1974 and her first novel,
Ceremony, in 1977. In many ways Ceremony was a Laguna answer to
N. Scott Momaday’s Pulitzer prize–winning House Made of Dawn. Like
Momaday, Silko weaves myth, history, and personal recollection, but
in Ceremony the importance of the feminine landscape replaces the
more male-centered story told by Momaday.
In Ceremony, Silko tells the story of Tayo, a mixed-blood Indian
who fights in World War II and returns to Laguna physically intact but
mentally fractured and deeply in shock from post-traumatic stress
syndrome. As critic Greg Sarris puts it, the novel “is about a man who
is displaced in World War II, taken away from his home, away from
the stories, and about having to come home and reacquaint himself
with, if you will, the landscape of who he is, his stories, what he knows
from the landscape. And as he reacquaints himself with the landscape
and the stories, he sees that his experience even in World War II was
never disconnected. That in fact, from the one place we can see all
places.” This reconnection begins with the opening, in which we find
Thought Woman, a mythic godlike figure, and Spider, creating a story.
As the novel progresses, language heals both the characters and the
readers; stories from the Pueblo oral tradition are interwoven with
contemporary updates of traditional healing rituals and discussions of
the development of the atomic bomb and uranium mining.
Among Silko’s other works are Storyteller (1981), a collection of stories and poems; Almanac of the Dead (1991), a blistering, apocalyptic
epic of North American minority, marginal, and underworld figures
and their struggles for power; and Gardens in the Dunes (1999), which
takes place around the turn of the twentieth century and explores the
Ghost Dance and the cultural dismay of a young Laguna girl as she is
taken in by a well-to-do white couple. Despite their often dark and disturbing qualities, all of Silko’s works address the possibility of renewal
or regeneration, particularly of American Indian cultures, values, and
ways of life. This hope always rests in part with developing a nurturing and respectful relationship with the landscape of the Southwest.
Place is never merely a “setting” in the Western sense; rather, it is inextricable from the life, values, and culture of a people—and their stories. The Laguna are a matrifocal community, and this worldview
infuses Silko’s work, which often retells female-centered myths around
the figures of Yellow Woman and Thought/Spider Woman. Silko has
said, “[Storytelling] is a way of interacting . . . a whole way of seeing
yourself, the people around you, your life, the place of your life in the
bigger context, not just in terms of nature and location but in terms of
what has gone on before, what’s happened to other people. It’s a whole
way of life.”
T E A C H I N G
T I P S
■ In her book The Sacred Hoop, author and critic (and cousin
of Silko) Paula Gunn Allen makes a rather bold statement about the
position of women in American Indian cultures: she argues that
“Traditional [American Indian] tribal lifestyles are more often gynocratic [governed by women] than not, and they are never patriarchal.”
Other scholars have refuted aspects of this statement (for example,
people have argued that the Sioux and other Plains tribes were in fact
patriarchal). However, it is clear that Allen’s statement is important for
understanding American Indian communities such as the Pueblos that
were matrilineal (descended through the maternal line) and/or matrifocal (female-centered). Allen and others have argued that readers
should pay attention to the way gender functions in texts by writers
from gynocratic communities since gender is constructed differently
in such communities than it is in mainstream American culture. As
your students read Ceremony, you might want to ask them how gender
is being constructed in this novel. How does Tayo compare to traditional European American male icons (e.g., John Wayne) or even to
Black Elk? How do the female characters compare to female cultural
icons in American culture?
L E S L I E
M A R M O N
S I L KO
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[5741] Anonymous, Two Navajo
Shaman Dry Painting to Cure an Illness
(n.d.), courtesy of the American Museum
of Natural History. Navajo sand paintings, or “dry” paintings, are meant to
summon and embody the spirits of the
holy people and are therefore wiped
away immediately after the Night Chant
ceremony.
[5882] Boyd Norton, Orange Mallow,
Showe Desert Flower (1972), courtesy of
Still Pictures Branch, National Archives
and Records Administration. The desert
is home to a surprising variety of plants
and animals. Much of Leslie Marmon
Silko’s work examines the relationship of
humans to the natural world, which she
sees as holding the key to spiritual
renewal and regeneration.
[5970] Nancy Crampton, Leslie
Marmon Silko Portrait (n.d.), courtesy of
Nancy Crampton. Leslie Marmon Silko
is a writer of mixed heritage—European,
Mexican, and Native American—and
she grew up in the ancient Pueblo town
Old Laguna.
[6113] Rudi Williams, Korean War Army
Veteran Ted Wood, an Abenaki Indian, in
Full Dress Uniform (1998), courtesy of
DefenseLINK News, U.S. Department of
Defense. Abenakis originally come from
New England and Canada. Ceremonies
honoring veterans are common at
Native American powwows, and many
communities have adapted special ceremonies (like the Navajo Enemyway
Chant) to help heal veterans. Leslie
Marmon Silko’s novel Ceremony portrays the recovery of a mixed-blood
Indian who fights in World War II and
returns to Laguna physically intact but
psychologically shattered.
[6532] Kenji Kawano, Navajo Navy Vet
(2001), courtesy of Kenji Kawano. A sizable proportion of the Native American
population served in World War II. In
her best-known work, Ceremony, Leslie
Marmon Silko tells the story of Tayo, a
WWII veteran whose horrific war experiences intensify the estrangement he feels
because of his mixed background.
[6626] Joel Grimes, Yeibichei Rocks at
Monument Valley (1992), courtesy of
Joel Grimes. The beauty of a sunset at
Monument Valley, a part of the Navajo
18
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V O I C E S
■ Some readers have suggested that Tayo’s encounter with Ts’eh in
Ceremony resembles a Yellow Woman story. Told by the Pueblo peoples of the Southwest, Yellow Woman stories dramatize how humans
interact with spirits in the world once it has been created. Although
there is always variation, Yellow Woman stories often involve a young
married woman who wanders beyond her village and has a sexual
encounter with a spirit-man; sometimes she is killed, but usually she
returns to her family and tribe having grown spiritually, and therefore
has an empowering influence on the people in general. In her influential essay “Kochinnenako in Academe,” Paula Gunn Allen points out
that Yellow Woman stories are “female-centered, always told from the
Yellow Woman’s point of view,” and that they generally highlight “her
alienation from the people,” but that her apparently transgressive acts
“often have happy outcomes for Kochinnenako [Yellow Woman] and
her people.” This suggests, Allen argues, “that the behavior of women,
at least at certain times or under certain circumstances, must be
improper or nonconformist for the greater good of the whole.” Like
many Native American stories, these narratives have the communal
function of both drawing socially important boundary lines and
observing where they sometimes need to be transgressed. In particular, according to Allen, they emphasize “the central role that woman
plays in the orderly life of the people.” Leslie Marmon Silko frequently
draws from the Yellow Woman tradition when she writes of empowered (especially sexually empowered) and empowering women
like the spirit-being Ts’eh. Why do you think Silko includes Tayo and
Ts’eh’s encounter in her novel? What is the purpose of the Yellow
Woman story? How does she update the story? What is the purpose of
Silko’s novel? What is the role of the oral tradition in general in
Ceremony?
Q U E S T I O N S
Comprehension: As the novel begins, what are some of the reasons
Tayo is so miserable?
Comprehension: List as many “ceremonies” as you can from the
novel. That is, if you think of Ceremony as a spiritual journey for
Tayo, how many stages does it have? Who are his guides on the
journey?
Comprehension: What exactly do the different ceremonies give to
Tayo? How has he changed by the end of the novel?
Context: What is the role of Ts’eh in the novel? Can you compare her
to other women characters in the novel? What about to Fleur and
Pauline in the story by Louise Erdrich? Does it matter that the main
character of Ceremony is a man? How would the novel be different
if the main character were a woman?
Context: Compare Silko’s portrait of Native American veterans to
Ortiz’s presentation of the issues surrounding veterans in “8:50 AM
Ft. Lyons VAH.”
Context: Do a close reading of Betonie’s ceremony. How does Betonie’s
ceremony compare to the Navajo Nightway chant? What is the goal
of each? What is the significance of innovations in the ceremony?
Exploration: How are time and space represented in the novel? How
does Silko suggest characteristics of a “ceremonial” time and space,
as opposed to the everyday European American senses of time and
space? Indeed, it is worth keeping these questions in mind when
reading all of the texts in this unit.
Exploration: In what sense is the novel a “ceremony” for the reader as
well as for Tayo? How do you imagine Native American readers
would respond differently to this book than would Americans of
European heritage? What about readers of African or Asian heritages?
Exploration: Write your own modern Yellow Woman story using the
theme of abduction and the traditional elements one would expect
to find in Yellow Woman stories.
Stories of the Beginning of the World
Myths—deeply traditional stories that explain the origins of a phenomenon or cultural practice—serve as some of the foundational narratives for the stories told by a people. When authors re-create or
adapt these myths for their own purposes, their audience must have a
firm understanding of the myths in order to understand the stories
that retell them. For instance, Herman Melville begins his novel MobyDick with the line “Call me Ishmael,” which invokes the Bible.
Similarly, the main characters in Native American literatures often
refer back to classical tales from the oral tradition, such as coyote
tales, cultural hero stories, migration legends, and creation stories.
Each of these stories has a standard set of characters, events, and elements. Knowing these original stories can help you better understand
the written literature that preceded them.
Like other Native American oral narratives such as cultural hero
and trickster stories, creation stories have etiological features or tags;
that is, they describe how some familiar characteristic of the world
came to be. Often the particular landscape and environment of the
tribe enters into such stories; sometimes the location of the tribe is
identified as the center of the world. The ceremonies that accompany
these creation myths often enact a ritual return to a combined sense
of origin and center, where healing and renewal can be found.
Like the biblical account in Genesis, Creation stories tell about
the beginning of the world and how the people first came to be.
Predominant among the tribes of what is now Canada and the eastern
United States were earth-diver stories, which tell of how the world was
created by beings who gathered mud from beneath the waters created
by a great flood. Common in the Southwest and elsewhere were emergence stories, which often describe how the people originated in the
womb of the Earth Mother and were called to the surface by Sun
Father. Despite the many differences among various tribes’ versions of
these stories, they generally establish how the world was created, how
S T O R I E S
O F
T H E
Nation, is captured in this photograph.
The traditional Native American reverence for the land is a cornerstone of the
thinking of many contemporary writers
as well as conservationists.
[6635] Skeet McAuley, Fallout Shelter
Directions (1984), courtesy of Sign
Language, Contemporary Southwest
Native America, Aperture Foundation,
Inc. Nuclear weapons were tested
throughout the Southwest. Such
weapons testing, for writers like Leslie
Marmon Silko, does not accord with the
respect that humans should show to the
natural world if we are to retain our
hopes for renewal and regeneration.
Huron tribe, Pair of dolls
(1830–50), courtesy of the Portland Art
Museum, gift of Elizabeth Cole Butler
[88.43.6-7].
[8113]
B E G I N N I N G
O F
T H E
W O R L D
19
“ S T O R I E S
O F
B E G I N N I N G
W O R L D ”
T H E
O F
W E B
T H E
A R C H I V E
[ 8 0 0 8 ] Greg Sarris, Interview:
“Coyote” (2002), courtesy of
Annenberg/CBP and American
Passages. Greg Sarris, author, professor
of English, and Pomo Indian, discusses
the trickster Coyote.
[8113] Huron tribe, Pair of dolls
(1830–50), courtesy of the Portland Art
Museum, gift of Elizabeth Cole Butler
[88.43.6-7]. Dolls like these, made by
the Huron tribe in the mid-nineteenth
century, played a number of roles in traditional Native American culture, including being used to teach children their
people’s history. The dolls were made
from wood, wool, and cotton cloth and
were adorned with metal and glass
beads, leather, and real hair.
[8115] Iroquois, Cradle board (back
side) (1830–50), courtesy of the
Portland Art Museum, gift of Elizabeth
Cole Butler. The “Iroquois Creation
Story” speaks of the infants in Sky
Woman’s womb. Cradle boards were
common for infants throughout Native
North America. One distinctively Eastern
Woodlands technique was quillwork
embroidery, which was later imitated
using beads or paint. Cradles were often
decorated with protective symbols to
guard babies against human and supernatural adversaries.
people developed out of ambiguously formed beings (who often had
both animal and human characteristics), what each tribe took to be
the basic relationships among people and between people and nature,
and the origins of important tribal customs and structures.
Trickster tales, one form of creation story, vary according to
their community, but they also share certain basic qualities. Tricksters
are more than deceivers or trick players who make us laugh with
their scatalogical humor: by crossing society’s boundaries they both
break rules and show the importance of rules after the world has
been created. They are also creators in their own right. Navajo storyteller Yellowman explains that he must tell about the trickster Coyote
because, as he says, “If my children hear the stories, they will grow
up to be good people; if they don’t hear them, they will turn out to
be bad. . . . Through the stories everything is made possible.” As
you read trickster tales, notice their unique characteristics. Consider
the presence of traditional elements, such as animals (e.g., buffalo,
coyote, spider, salmon), vegetables (e.g., corn), minerals, landscape,
weather, colors, directions, time, dances, and the supernatural.
T E A C H I N G
T I P S
■ It is important that students begin to have a sense of the traditions of their own region. Investigate what resources are available
from Native American storytellers in your area. If possible, invite a
local Native American storyteller to your class or play a recorded performance from an audio- or videocassette. Your reference librarian
should be able to help you locate resources.
■ Students can learn about the performative nature of storytelling
by telling stories themselves. Have students pick one of the legends,
memorize it, and recite it as an engaging story to the class. You may
want to have students work in groups so that they can coach one
another or work on smaller segments.
Q U E S T I O N S
Comprehension: What is a creation story? How does it differ from an
emergence story?
Comprehension: What is a trickster? What does a trickster do?
Comprehension: What according to the Pima and the Iroquois existed
at the beginning of time?
Comprehension: In the Iroquois creation story the monsters are
concerned when Sky Woman sinks into the dark world. What does
their reaction tell us about the nature of monsters and the lower
world?
Comprehension: In the Pima emergence story, Juh-wert-a-Mah-kai
had to rub his palm four times before the world was created. What
else has to be done four times in the Pima stories? What does the
number 4 come to mean by the end of the stories?
Context: Listen to the audio clip about Coyote [8008]. Compare him
to the trickster figures found in the Winnebago, Sioux, Koasati,
20
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Coville, Clatsop Chinook, and Navajo stories. Which of the trickster
figures does he most resemble? Which does he differ from the
most?
Context: What are the themes and elements of some of the trickster
tales? How do these compare to the gambler tales as described in
the Extended Context “Sacred Play: Gambling in Native Cultures”?
Context: Examine the Iroquois Cradle [8115] and the Huron Dolls
[8113]. Do these appear to have been created by the good or bad
mind of the Iroquois creation story? How do you know?
Exploration: Is the Iroquois creation myth still an Iroquois text if it
has been translated into English? Does such a translation so alter
the meaning that it is no longer accurate to speak of it as Iroquoian,
or should the fact of translation merely make readers more cautious, less eager to assume that they understand it? Is it better for
non-Indians to have no access to such texts than to have texts that
may be contaminated or inaccurate?
Exploration: The theme of rival twins is widespread in the Americas
and in the Bible. What cultural anxieties or issues does this theme
address? What might account for its popularity?
Louise Erdrich (b. 1954)
Born in Little Falls, Minnesota, Louise Erdrich is a member of the
Turtle Mountain Chippewa tribe of North Dakota. The Chippewa are
also called the Ojibwa, or, in their own Algonquian language, the
Anishinabe, both of which terms appear in Erdrich’s work. Erdrich’s
French-Chippewa mother and her German-American father were
teachers for the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Wahpeton, Minnesota. Her
maternal grandmother was tribal chairwoman on the Turtle Mountain
Reservation. After attending Dartmouth College
(where she studied under her future husband and
collaborator, Michael Dorris), Erdrich received her
M.A. from the Johns Hopkins University in 1979 and
later edited the Boston Indian Council’s newspaper,
The Circle. Erdrich also held a variety of other jobs,
such as lifeguard, waitress, prison poetry teacher,
and construction flag signaler, which she has said
greatly helped her writing. The winner of numerous
prizes for her literature, she has published both fiction and poetry.
In 1984 Erdrich published both her first volume of poetry, Jacklight,
and her first novel, Love Medicine. The novel, a series of discrete stories spanning the years 1934 to 1984, is told by seven narrators and
follows the relations among three Chippewa families: the Kashpaws,
the Lamartine/Nanapushes, and the Morriseys. A number of Erdrich’s
later novels, including The Beet Queen (1986), Tracks (1988), The Bingo
Palace (1994), and Tales of Burning Love (1996), focus on various members of these same families and their lives in and around a reservation
in the fictional town of Argus, North Dakota. As do many writers of
American Indian descent, Erdrich attributes her interest in literature
Linde, Five Ojibwa Indians:
Man, Woman, and Three Children in
Canoe—[”Typical Natives”] (c. 1913),
courtesy of the Library of Congress [LCUSZ62-101332].
[7427]
LO U I S E
E R D R I C H
21
in part to her cultural heritage. She has said, “People in [Indian] families make everything into a story. . . . People just sit and the stories
start coming, one after another. I suppose that when you grow up constantly hearing the stories rise, break, and fall, it gets into you somehow.” Tracks (Chapter 2 of which was published as “Fleur” in 1986) is
typical of her novels in emphasizing how events are always understood
and told by people with particular points of view, with their own
assumptions, quirks, and belief systems. The story of the powerful
Fleur Pillager is told by the fearful and confused Pauline Puyat, who
later in the novel becomes Sister Leopolda and acts as an antagonist
to Fleur. “Fleur” (subtitled “Pauline” in Tracks) explores both Fleur’s
power and Pauline’s self-deception.
Many of Erdrich’s novels are interwoven with characters or motifs
from the Chippewa oral tradition. For the Chippewas the ultimate
sources of existence were the manitos—extremely powerful beings
who might be roughly characterized as spirits or gods that provided
people with food (through hunting) and good health. In addition to
Pau-Puk-Keewis, the Chippewa gambler, windigos, Nanabozho (the
Chippewa cultural hero/trickster), and the underwater manito—all
manitos from the Chippewa oral tradition—appear in Erdrich’s work.
Windigos are cannibals made of ice or people whose insides are ice. In
other novels in the Love Medicine series, we learn that members of the
Nanapush family (including Fleur) may have gone “windigo” during
starving times long ago. Nanabozho was important to Chippewas as
hunters, and he helped Chippewa culture. Critics have argued that
Erdrich’s character Gerry Morrisey is based both on this trickster/
cultural hero (hence his supernatural ability to escape) and on Leonard Peltier—the Chippewa hero and activist. The underwater manito
could both save people who fell through the ice and drown those who
wandered—one of the worst ways that a Chippewa could die. Fleur
encounters the underwater manito and survives, which tells us something about her power.
T E A C H I N G
T I P S
■ Have your students write a character sketch of Fleur. Does she
change or surprise us, or is she constant? At what point do we know
that Fleur is different from the other characters in the story? What linguistic and literary devices does Erdrich use to call attention to this
difference?
■ It may be helpful to fill students in on some background about
Fleur and the stories that people in her community tell about her, such
as the idea that during a starving time she went windigo or that she
met with an underwater manito and survived. One ethnographer
reports that the Chippewa of Parry Island say there are spirits everywhere, “or there were until the white man came, for today, the Indians
say, most of them have moved away.” Ask students to consider what it
means that Fleur maintains this close relationship to the spirit realm
even in the face of white settlement. What role does the supernatural
play in the story?
22
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Q U E S T I O N S
E R D R I C H
Comprehension: Why is Fleur so threatening to the men? How do
they respond to this threat?
Comprehension: By the end of the story, who does it seem did the
actual locking up of the men in the meat locker?
Context: How are we meant to evaluate Fleur? How do the initial
supernatural hints inform our feelings about her? What are we to
make of her impossibly lucky poker playing? What is her relationship to her Chippewa heritage?
Context: How are we meant to evaluate the narrator, Pauline? What
are we to make of her rejection of the Chippewa, her assertion that
she “was made for better”? Why does she not help Fleur?
Exploration: What do you make of the fact that the story as originally
published is “Fleur,” but that its appearance in Tracks is subtitled
“Pauline”? If possible, read the novel to answer this question; however, you might speculate about this apparent interchangeability
based simply upon the events and narration of the story.
Exploration: Why does it matter that the main characters here are
both women? You might think of the story as an exploration of the
range of options that Chippewa women in 1913 had to exercise
power. In that case, consider the varying forms of power that both
women display and speculate on what you think Erdrich is saying
about gender.
[7178]
Chippewa Songs
Frances Densmore collected these Chippewa songs between 1907 and
1909. The songs reflect the culture of the Chippewa peoples who once
lived along the shores of Lake Huron and Lake Superior, across
Minnesota, and west to North Dakota. The Chippewa are Algonquian
Indians; that is, they speak a language that is related to those others
classified as part of the central Algonquian group. Chippewa and
Ojibwa are the same word pronounced differently. They are composed
of numerous tribes and bands, including the Turtle Mountain Band
of which Louise Erdrich is a member. The Chippewa were the largest
Great Lakes tribe and one of the most powerful tribes in North
America. Because the Chippewa did not possess good farming lands,
white settlement in their homelands was minimal, and hence they
have been able to maintain much of their language and culture.
Chippewa culture varies with geographic location: on the plains, for
example, the Chippewa hunted buffalo. Most Ojibwe lived in the
northern Great Lakes region and cultivated crops and supplemented
their diet with hunting and gathering. They were skilled hunters, trappers, and fishers. The lakes and the spirits of the lake—the underwater
manitos—became a central part of their cosmology.
Like other Algonquian peoples, the Chippewa lived in tipis. Theirs
were dome-shaped and were made of birch bark that could be rolled
up for easy transportation. Clothing was made out of buckskin and
furs that were dyed. Today the Chippewa are renowned for their beautiful beadwork, particularly their beaded bandolier bags, named for
W E B
A R C H I V E
Vera Palmer, Interview: “Erdrich
and the Captivity Narrative” (2001),
courtesy of Annenberg Media. Vera
Palmer, a distinguished American Indian
activist and scholar, earned her Ph.D.
from Cornell University. In an American
Passages interview she talks about
Louise Erdrich’s poem “Captivity.”
[7427] Linde, Five Ojibwa Indians:
Man, Woman, and Three Children in
Canoe—[“Typical Natives”] (c. 1913),
courtesy of the Library of Congress [LCUSZ62-101332]. For the Chippewas the
ultimate sources of existence were the
manitos—powerful beings who might be
roughly characterized as spirits or gods.
The underwater manito could both save
people who fell through the ice and
drown those who wandered.
[7590] George Catlin, Sha-Co-Pay (The
Six), [Chief of the Plains Ojibwa] (1842),
courtesy of Tilt and Bogue, London.
“The chief of that part of the Ojibbeway
tribe who inhabit these northern regions,
and whose name is Sha-co-pay (the Six),
is a man of huge size; with dignity of
manner, and pride and vanity, just about
in proportion to his bulk.”—George
Catlin. This painting is one of 520 that
resulted from an eight-year expedition
during which Catlin visited over forty-five
different tribes, participated in buffalo
hunts, and observed ceremonies,
games, dances and rituals.
C H I P P E W A
S O N G S
23
Anonymous, Rocky Boy (Stone
Child), a Chippewa Chief, ThreeQuarter Length, Standing, Dressed in
Ornate Costume (n.d.), courtesy of the
National Archives and Records
Administration, Still Pictures Branch.
[7428]
the bandolier, an ammunition belt worn over the shoulder and across
the chest. These decorative bags served many utilitarian purposes. The
Ojibwa often passed the time and entertained each other with stories
and songs such as the ones in The Norton Anthology of American
Literature.
It is important to remember that while some songs are sacred and
were both received and sung in a ceremonial context, others were not.
As Frances Densmore, who collected a wide variety of songs among
the Chippewa, explained in her 1915 article in The Musical Quarterly:
“Among the Chippewa it was the custom for medicine men to build
‘nests’ in the trees, where they waited, fasting, until they secured a
dream and its song. A man was very proud of a song received in this
manner. . . . A medicine man always sang his principal dream song
and related the dream before he began to treat a sick person.” For
Densmore, love songs were wholly removed from this more sacred and
traditional context. She identified three levels of songs: “First, there
still remain some of the old songs, sung by the old singers. . . . Second,
there are old ceremonial and medicine songs belonging to men now
dead, but which can be sung, and sung with reasonable correctness,
by men who heard them given by their owners. . . . Third, there are
comparatively modern songs, which represent a transitional culture.
If differentiated from the really old songs, these are not devoid of
interest, though it is scarcely worth while to collect a great many of
them.” Love songs were in this third “modern” category.
T E A C H I N G
T I P S
■ Play your students some of the music from the Chippewa songs
in the archive. What is the tone of the music? How does it compare to
the tone of the Chippewa songs in The Norton Anthology of American
Literature? Using Densmore’s categories as a starting point, have students create their own categories for the types of music.
■ Early musicologist Frances Densmore has this to say about the
thirty love songs she recorded: “Only one was inspired by happiness.
All these songs were comparatively modern. Too frequently the words
contained the information that the singer intended to drown disappointment in liquor. On moonlight nights one hears wailing songs of
this kind issuing from the barred windows of the agency guardhouse.
Let us hope that future students of Indian music will pass them by.
Weird they are, and melodious they may be, but representative of true
Indian character they assuredly are not.” Ask students to refute
Densmore’s claim. Upon what assumptions is it based? What does she
mean by “true Indian character”? Why does she think that these songs
would be less worth collecting?
Q U E S T I O N S
Comprehension: Musicologist Frances Densmore claims that the
Chippewa love songs are “comparatively modern songs, which represent a transitional culture.” Where do you see aspects of tra-
24
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ditional Chippewa culture in these songs? Where do you see
European American influences?
Comprehension: What is the tone of each of the songs? How does the
tone compare to love songs you hear on the radio?
Comprehension: Why are there several Chippewa songs about Sioux
women? What do Sioux women represent?
Context: Compare the more whimsical Chippewa love songs to the
more ceremonial Ghost Dance songs. What rhythmic or linguistic
clues help the reader know that the Ghost Dance songs are more
serious in nature?
Context: How are women represented in the songs? To what extent
are these representations consonant with traditional Western
stereotypes about women, and to what extent do they challenge
those stereotypes?
Context: Compare the vision of love presented in the Chippewa love
songs with that in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine or The Bingo
Palace. What does Lipsha mean by love?
Exploration: During the Renaissance, the Italian poet Petrarch
refined a series of conceits that came to epitomize the way Western
poets talked about the beloved. These include the idea of love as a
battle or hunt, the power of the beloved’s gaze being like a ray, the
beauty of the beloved’s person being like flowers or jewels, and the
comparison of the beloved to a sun or star. Identify and examine
Chippewa love conventions.
Exploration: Love is often depicted as a battle or hunt, in which the
true test of passion comes in the pursuit. Compare the tension
between the singer and the beloved in English poet Thomas Wyatt’s
“Whoso List to Hunt” and Chippewa poet Louise Erdrich’s
“Jacklight.”
“ C H I P P E W A
W E B
S O N G S ”
A R C H I V E
Anonymous, Rocky Boy (Stone
Child), A Chippewa Chief, ThreeQuarter Length, Standing, Dressed in
Ornate Costume (n.d.), courtesy of the
National Archives, Still Pictures Branch.
Native American “Chief Songs” were
sung by community members in praise
of and to their chief. Fancy dress such as
the outfit worn by Rocky Boy (Stone
Child) reinforces authority and status in
American Indian cultures. Rocky Boy was
a famous chief, and the Rocky Boy
Indian Reservation in Montana is named
after him.
[9087] Cal Scott, Music of Chippewa
Songs (2002), courtesy of Cal Scott
Music. This is a sound recording of the
music for the Chippewa songs featured
in The Norton Anthology of American
Literature.
[9106] Thomas Wyatt, “Whoso List to
Hunt,” from The Poems of Sir Thomas
Wiat (1913), courtesy of University of
London Press. English poet Thomas
Wyatt here reflects on the relationship
between hunting and loving, a relationship that is also posed in contemporary
poems like “Jacklight” by Louise Erdrich.
[7428]
Black Elk (1863–1950) and John G. Neihardt (1881–1973)
Born into the Oglala Lakota, Black Elk was an important Sioux visionary and religious leader. As a young man he received a Great Vision in
which the Six Grandfathers—powers of the West, the North, the East,
the South, the Sky, and the Earth—appeared to him. This vision was
powerful enough to remain an important part of his consciousness as
he grew up, and he became a shamanic healer in his late teenage
years. When, in 1886, Black Elk joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show,
he became an Episcopalian, because all employees were required to
be Christian. Though he later converted to Catholicism (in 1904), he
passed on his vision to poet John G. Neihardt, and the record of this
interaction became the 1932 book Black Elk Speaks. Much of the
extant record of Native American narrative, poetry, and myth comes
from transcriptions and translations often made by late-nineteenthand early-twentieth-century, non–Native American anthropologists.
John G. Neihardt, however, was not an anthropologist, and he did not
speak Lakota; thus, his account of Black Elk’s vision is not only filtered through several translators and transcribers but has been altered
to fit Neihardt’s own interpretation of Black Elk’s world. These prac-
B L A C K
E L K
A N D
J O H N
G .
N E I H A R D T
25
Anonymous, Poster for Buffalo
Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough
Riders of the World (c. 1899), courtesy
of the Library of Congress [LC-USZC42943].
[2251]
tices make Black Elk Speaks problematic if viewed
as an authoritative American Indian text. In spite of
these problems, the book has been—and continues
to be—enormously influential.
John G. Neihardt, poet laureate of Nebraska, had
a literary rather than a purely scientific motivation
for speaking to Black Elk: he was gathering research
material for the last volume of his epic poem, A
Cycle of the West. In 1930 and 1931, he made several
trips to Black Elk’s cabin outside of Manderson,
South Dakota, where they discussed poetry, spirituality, and Black Elk’s life. Black Elk Speaks is also a
product of the political upheavals of the 1930s. Even
as Black Elk Speaks recounts the earlier period of
renewal during the Ghost Dance Movement, the authors are speaking
and writing during another important period of American Indian rejuvenation—the years leading up to the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA)
or “Indian New Deal” of 1934. John Collier, the mastermind behind
the IRA, suggests that the “Indian New Deal . . . held two purposes.
One was the conservation of the biological Indian and of Indian culture, each with its special purposes. The other . . . was the conservation of the Indian’s natural resources.” As an acquaintance of Collier
(and later an employee of the Bureau of Indian Affairs [BIA]),
Neihardt was intimately acquainted with the movement leading up to
the IRA. It is clear that the more bellicose aspects of Black Elk’s story
were excised by Neihardt in an effort not to offend white readers. The
relationship between the two men was, however, reciprocal: while
Neihardt found in Black Elk a fertile resource for understanding
Native American culture, Black Elk saw in Neihardt someone who
could disseminate a prophetic vision he had experienced some sixty
years earlier.
During the 1960s and 1970s, Black Elks Speaks became an important text for Indian activists who wanted to access earlier visions of
power. Vine Deloria went so far as to call it the Indian Bible. For literary scholars, however, the text raises questions about the limits of
autobiography (how can an autobiography have been written by someone else?) and the oxymoron at the heart of the phrase “American
Indian autobiography.” As Arnold Krupat pointed out in 1981,
Autobiography as a particular form of self-written life is a European
invention of comparatively recent date. . . . [W]e may note that the
autobiographical project, as we usually understand it, is marked by
egocentric individualism, historicism, and writing. These are all present in European and Euro American culture after the revolutionary
last quarter of the eighteenth century. But none has ever characterized the native cultures of the present-day United States.
Mixed-blood critic Hertha Wong has argued that precontact written
texts—as well as the oral tradition—help explain one of the fundamen-
26
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V O I C E S
tal differences between American Indian and Western autobiographies. Wong argues that the pictographic writings of the Sioux and
other Plains tribes tended, like the oral tradition, to tell stories about
the self which might be more accurately described as “communo-biooratory”(community-life-speaking) rather than “auto-bio-graphical”
(self-life-writing), since they were about the person’s life in the context
of their human, spiritual, and natural communities and the writings
were intended to be part of an oral recitation, rather than to stand on
their own. Black Elk Speaks provides an opportunity to question our
assumptions about the genres of biography and autobiography more
generally.
T E A C H I N G
T I P S
■ Have your students pair up and interview one another about
their lives. Then have them write an “autobiography” for their partner.
Follow this up by having the interviewee write a short comment on his
or her “autobiography.” This activity illustrates the point that there is
always a selection process in autobiography and also shows how the
choice is lost when one is no longer the writer of the work.
■ In the oral tradition, repetition is crucial both for ceremonial reasons and because it aids in the process of memorization (which is how
oral texts are preserved). In contrast, in written texts, we can turn back
to earlier information if we need it; hence, repetition is less necessary.
Ask students to pay attention in Black Elk Speaks both to what gets
repeated and to how many times the reptition occurs. (In the Bible,
the numbers 3, 4, and 7 are important. What numbers are important
for Black Elk and why? What are their religious associations?) For
many oral cultures, words have a great power to harm, heal, and create (think of the opening of the Bible, for example—originally an oral
text.) Thus, to repeat words is to wield a certain power. What kind of
power does language have in Black Elk Speaks? In addition to its ceremonial uses, repetition is also a crucial way of providing narrative
cohesion in oral narratives. Repeating aspects of a story enables items
to be linked in the minds of the listeners: what events and ideas does
Black Elk link in his text and with what effect?
B L A C K
E L K
N E I H A R D T
A N D
W E B
J O H N
G .
A R C H I V E
[2251] Anonymous, Poster for Buffalo
Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough
Riders of the World (c. 1899), courtesy
of the Library of Congress [LC-USZC42943]. As a young man, Black Elk took
part in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show.
This poster shows a band of Rough
Riders battling Cuban insurgents. The
famous charge at San Juan Hill had
taken place the previous year.
[7418] Anonymous, Boy’s moccasins,
Lakota (n.d.), courtesy of the New York
State Historical Association, Thaw
Collection. Reservation-period (post1880) beadwork on these dress moccasins shows how the American flag
motif was incorporated into Native
American design. This motif has been
read as a sign of assimilation or as a
way to capture the power of the enemy.
[8117] Mandan and Plains Indians,
Moccasins (c. 1850–70), courtesy of the
Portland Art Museum, gift of Elizabeth
Cole Butler. Typical Plains clothing
included buckskin aprons, leggings, and
moccasins for men and buckskin dresses
for women. Buffalo-skin robes were
worn in cold weather. Decorated moccasins are common in portraits and
photos of Plains Indians.
Q U E S T I O N S
Comprehension: Who is Black Elk? Why does he receive the vision?
Comprehension: What seems to be the purpose of the Grandfathers’
council that Black Elk attends? What do the Grandfathers want to
teach Black Elk?
Comprehension: What are the “four ascents” that Black Elk encounters?
Context: Consider the recurrence of the hoop in Black Elk’s vision. For
the Sioux, circles stand for the cyclical, interconnected nature of
life itself. Given this, how does the appearance of the hoop affect
the significance of Black Elk Speaks?
B L A C K
E L K
A N D
J O H N
G .
N E I H A R D T
27
Context: Black Elk’s revelation occurred when he was nine years old,
in 1872—seventeen years before the Ghost Dance religion came to
the Sioux nation. How does Black Elk’s vision compare to the
motifs present in the Ghost Dance songs and Wovoka’s “Messiah
letters”?
Context: What is the relationship between Black Elk Speaks and the
policies of the Indian New Deal (e.g., does it affirm, respond to,
complicate, or negate such goals)? Does Neihardt (or Black Elk)
believe in the “continuity of the group”? What must be continued?
What “certain kinds of changes” should be induced and which
should be controlled? What “traditions” must be “conserved”?
Context: Examine the Lakota boy’s moccasins decorated with American flags [7418] and compare them to the Plains moccasins [8117].
Is one of these more “traditional”? What are you assuming “traditional” means? How do you think Black Elk would have understood
each of these artifacts?
Exploration: Consider the vision from Black Elk Speaks as literature.
In what way is it like other literary texts with which you might be
more familiar and that are more clearly fictional? Is this text “fictional” in any way? To what extent should we consider what we
could call the text’s multiple-authorship when interpreting it?
Exploration: Compare this vision with one or both of the most
famous prophetic visions in the Western tradition, the biblical
Books of Daniel and Revelation. How does Black Elk’s vision compare to those granted to Daniel and John of Patmos? What are the
most compelling clues in Black Elk’s narrative that signify that he
experienced a non-Western revelation (again, think especially of the
hoop imagery)?
Western Photograph Company,
Gathering Up the Dead at the Battlefield
of Wounded Knee, South Dakota
(1891), courtesy of the Smithsonian
Institution.
[4219]
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Ghost Dance Songs
One of the most tragic events in Native American history was the massacre of some two hundred Sioux men, women, and children at
Wounded Knee, South Dakota, on the Pine Ridge reservation, on
December 15, 1890. The slaughter of the Sioux was
provoked in part by the Seventh Cavalry’s reaction
to a multiday ceremony known as the Ghost Dance.
A combination of traditional native religion and
Christianity, the Ghost Dance religion had begun
when a Paiute man, Wovoka, also called Jack Wilson, had a vision in 1889 shortly after a solar
eclipse. After collapsing with severe scarlet fever,
Wovoka found himself spiritually transported to a
village where all the ancestors lived peacefully, surrounded by the old environment and engaging in
the old activities. This precontact world would be
soon restored to the indigenous people, God told Wovoka, so they
should prepare themselves for its coming: they should live in peace,
work, not lie or steal, and dance a Ghost Dance that would hasten the
return of the old world: the buffalo would again be plentiful and the
Europeans would be swept away.
When Wovoka emerged from his fever, he began to spread this
prophecy, which traveled widely among Plains Indians (as it had on a
smaller scale in California in the early 1870s); before long 20,000
Sioux had begun to engage in the dance. Because this spiritual movement foretold the imminent destruction of the European invaders, it
made U.S. officials extremely uneasy, and tensions reached the breaking point at Wounded Knee. By 1889, American Indians had already
experienced several hundred years of physical and cultural violence,
including the 1871 Congressional termination of treaties with native
nations which opened the door even wider for decimation of the land,
destruction of the buffalo, and starvation of the people. The Ghost
Dance offered a hope for a new world, in the form of the old world of
the ancestors, but that hope largely vanished after the Wounded Knee
massacre. The Ghost Dance songs accompanied the dance itself,
which was a version of the communal dance form long present in
North America. The songs generally involved apocalyptic visions experienced by the Ghost Dancers, but they also incorporated native customs and images, as well as aspects of the daily life of the tribe. In its
syncretism (its combining of different spiritual traditions), the Ghost
Dance thus illustrates the American Indian value of keeping rituals
currently relevant to the life of the tribe.
Like most traditional Native American songs, the Ghost Dance
songs were never meant to be written down, but were intended to be
experienced in an oral, ritual setting as an accompaniment to physical
movement. Here literature is meant to act on the community, to affect
the world in which it is performed, rather than to be passively consumed by individual audience members. Records of the Ghost Dance
Movement and of Wounded Knee appear in Black Elk Speaks and in
Charles Alexander Eastman’s From the Deep Woods to Civilization, as
well as in James Mooney’s The Ghost Dance Religion and the Sioux
Outbreak of 1890.
T E A C H I N G
T I P S
■ In his book A Little Matter Called Genocide, American Indian
Movement (AIM) activist Ward Churchill places images of stacked
bodies from Wounded Knee next to images of bodies from German
concentration camps in World War II. These images have some shocking similarities and force the question: was Wounded Knee a genocidal act? More importantly, what are the implications of calling it one?
Ask your students to define the word “genocide” and then to debate
when we should limit the use of the word.
■ Have your students read either Black Elk’s or Eastman’s description of the Ghost Dance movement before they read the Ghost Dance
songs. Why were the whites in the area so scared? You may want to
have your students read the sections surrounding the description so
they know what led up to the incident.
G H O S T
D A N C E
S O N G S
29
G H O S T
W E B
D A N C E
S O N G S
A R C H I V E
Western Photograph Company,
Gathering up the Dead at the Battle
Field of Wounded Knee, South Dakota
(1891), courtesy of the Smithsonian
Institution. U.S. soldiers standing in front
of a wagon full of dead Sioux. A blizzard
delayed the burial of the dead.
Eventually the Sioux were buried in a
mass grave, with little effort made to
identify the bodies.
[8102] Blackfeet Tribe, Shirt (c. 1890),
courtesy of the Portland Art Museum, gift
of Elizabeth Cole Butler. [86.126.32].
Shirts such as this one were worn by
practitioners of the Ghost Dance religion. Clothing varied from tribe to tribe,
but many believed that the shirts protected wearers from bullets and attack.
[4219]
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■ Unlike the Chippewa songs included in this unit, the Ghost
Dance songs were highly ritualistic and performative: they were
intended to bring about the deeds they describe. If we take these songs
seriously, this would be disastrous for many of their readers. What
does it mean, then, to read these songs respectfully? Use this as a
problem-solving activity for students. How can an audience respond
to literature that may, at its heart, want to end that audience’s very
existence? How does the text change when read by those who identify
with the author, those who are targeted by the author, and those who
are not directly implicated by the text? (Amiri Baraka’s “Black Art”
poems pose issues related to these questions.)
Q U E S T I O N S
Comprehension: What is the purpose of the Ghost Dance songs? How
did they aim to accomplish this goal? In what context were they
first performed?
Comprehension: According to the songs, what exactly is “approaching” or “coming”?
Context: Repetition is an important part of most Native American rituals. It can, for example, emphasize ideas and strengthen the bonds
of the community. What is the effect of the repetition in these
songs? Given that the “message” of the words could be conveyed
without the repetition, how would the songs be different without
it?
Context: Why do the songs evoke both imminent change in North
American power structures and the details of traditional tribal ways
of life (for example, the processing of meat)?
Exploration: Mixed-blood critic Hertha Wong has argued that the
pictographic writings of the Sioux and other Plains tribes tended,
like works in the oral tradition, to tell stories about the self which
might be more accurately described as “communo-bio-oratory”
(community-life-speaking) rather than “auto-bio-graphical” (selflife-writing). In other words, they were about the person’s life in the
context of his or her human, spiritual, and natural communities and the writings were intended to be part of an oral recitation, rather than stand on their own. How is Black Elk’s narrative
“communo-bio-oratory”? Is Black Elk’s story community-centered?
If so, how and who is his community? What is the role of the spoken word in his text?
Exploration: Compare these songs with both Black Elk’s vision and
the Book of Revelation. Keeping in mind that “apocalypse” is a
transliteration of the Greek word for “revelation,” consider how the
Ghost Dance’s vision of apocalypse compares to that in other works.
Non-Native Representations of Indians
Roger Williams (c. 1603–1683)
Although we do not have written texts by Algonquian Indians from the
very early contact period, we can learn about their language and culture from the way it is presented by such Europeans as Roger
Williams, who lived among native communities. A Puritan whose
unorthodox views alienated him from both the Massachusetts Bay and
the Plymouth colonies, Williams has been reclaimed by some contemporary scholars as a democratic and pluralistic hero. Born in London,
Williams studied at Cambridge, where he received his B.A. in 1627,
but which he left in 1629, without having completed his M.A., to
become a Puritan chaplain. He sailed to the New World on December 10, 1630; there tensions almost immediately arose between him
and various members of the Puritan hierarchy (including, at different
times, William Bradford, John Winthrop, and Cotton Mather—writers
featured in Unit 3, “Utopian Promise”).
The primary theological and political position that distinguished
Williams was his assertion that church and state should be separate
entities, with neither one having jurisdiction in the matters of the
other. This was the first American articulation of the separation
of church and state, appearing some 150 years before Thomas
Jefferson’s, and it did not sit at all well with the Puritan oligarchy
(though it is worth noting that, unlike Jefferson’s, Williams’s concern
was that the church not be corrupted by the state). In particular,
Williams argued that the Massachusetts Bay Puritans should distance
themselves from England (and therefore from English material support) by becoming Separatists, that their royal charter was invalid
since Christians had no right to heathen lands, and that civil authorities should not meddle in spiritual affairs. When he was charged
with subversion and spreading discord, he moved from Boston to
Plymouth, where he established friendly trading relations with the
Indians. Williams soon became pastor to Salem, where he continued
preaching his subversive doctrines and in 1635 was indicted for heresy
and divisiveness and sentenced to be banished. He escaped this fate
only by fleeing to an Indian settlement, where he purchased land from
the Narragansetts and founded Providence. This city became a haven
for exiles and outcasts, from Anne Hutchinson to Baptists, Seekers,
Antinomians, Quakers, and Jews.
Throughout his life Williams held important offices and fought
for Native American rights, acting as negotiator for the Narragansetts
during King Philip’s War (which did not prevent them from being all
but decimated by the end of that war). Although he produced various
texts, his most famous is A Key into the Language of America (1643),
which is in part a promotional tract for New World settlement in the
tradition of Thomas Harriot’s A Brief and True Report of the New Found
Land of Virginia. A Key into the Language of America, however, is much
more complicated ideologically: it is also an ethnographic study of
Native American culture, a grammar of Native American languages, a
defense of Native American cultures in the face of European allega-
Roger Williams, A Key into the
Language of America (1643), courtesy
of the Rosenbach Museum & Library.
[5219]
R O G E R
W I L L I A M S
31
W I L L I A M S
W E B
A R C H I V E
John Underhill, The Figure of the
Indians’ Fort or Palizado in New England
and the Manner of the Destroying it by
Captayne Underhill and Captayne
Mason (1638), courtesy of the Library of
Congress [LC-USZ62-32055]. In 1636,
the English settlers engaged in a campaign to wipe out the Pequot tribe of
New England. Captain John Underhill
chronicled the Pequot War in his News
from America (1638), providing this
sketch of the Puritans, along with their
Narragansett allies, encircling and
destroying a Pequot village.
[1232] Roger Williams, The Bloudy
Tenent, of Persecution, for Cause of
Conscience, Discussed, in a Conference
Betweene Truth and Peace (1644), courtesy of the Library of Congress. Roger
Williams’s Bloudy Tenent of Persecution
was a plea to the Massachusetts legislature for freedom of conscience for himself and others in the Massachusetts Bay
Colony.
[5219] Roger Williams, A Key into the
Language of America (1643), courtesy
of the Rosenbach Museum & Library.
Williams held important offices and
fought for Native American rights,
including acting as negotiator for the
Narragansetts during King Philip’s War.
In 1643 he published A Key into the
Language of America. A Key, which
deals with Narragansett language and
culture, is an unusual and sympathetic
mix of ethnography, grammar, and promotional tract.
[6942] Christopher Moses, Photo of
Statue of Roger Williams, Providence,
Rhode Island (2002), courtesy of
Christopher Moses. A Puritan whose
unorthodox views alienated him from
both the Massachusetts Bay and the
Plymouth colonies, Roger Williams has
been reclaimed by some contemporary
scholars as a democratic and pluralistic
hero.
[1210]
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tions of immorality, and a lament for the “false religion” of the natives.
Although Williams shared the common European assumption that
only Christianity could save souls, this text does reveal his interest in
analyzing American Indian language and culture on its own
terms rather than by Western standards alone. Williams, like many
Puritans, subscribed to the theory that Indians were ancestors of one
of the “lost tribes” of Israel, applying a falsely Eurocentric view of
native genealogy. Still, Williams remains one of the most powerful
seventeenth-century European voices of sympathy and admiration for
the American Indian.
T E A C H I N G
T I P S
■ Have your students write a natural history of, or promotional
tract for, a place in which they have lived, using the standard structure
of Renaissance travel literature. How does their work compare to Harriot’s or Williams’s?
■ Have your students write a first-contact narrative about meeting
the Narragansetts or Wampanoags from a Puritan point of view. What
is likely to have concerned them? What differences are they likely to
have noticed? How is their text a bicultural production?
■ Ask your students to compare the Puritan creation stories
(Genesis, for example) to those of the Native Americans in the East.
What does each tell us about how they view humans? How they view
the supernatural? How they view the relationship between the two?
Q U E S T I O N S
Comprehension: What does Williams say about the religion of the
natives?
Comprehension: According to Williams, why did he write A Key into
the Language of America?
Context: What is the effect of Williams’s constructing his book as “an
implicit dialogue” that “respects the native language of it”? Keep in
mind that there was a range of seventeenth-century opinion about
how the Indians should be treated, with some advocating negotiation and partnership and others arguing for their elimination. Do
you think Williams implies a value judgment when he describes the
Narragansett language as “exceeding[ly] copious”?
Context: Compare Williams’s attitude toward the Indians with
Thomas Harriot’s (below). What message about Native Americans
does each try to convey to his Renaissance English readers?
Exploration: To what extent is Williams “ethnocentric”? That is, to
what extent does he seem to assume that European culture and
beliefs are true and correct and that, therefore, alternative cultures
and beliefs must be inferior?
Exploration: Compare Williams’s portrait of the Narragansetts to
Mary Rowlandson’s (Unit 3). What, besides circumstance, seems to
account for his greater sympathy?
Exploration: Spanish American grammars of the New World from the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries tended to be organized in the
same format as Latin grammars. Williams’s grammar, on the other
hand, is startlingly new in that it organizes its linguistic information by situation. What impact does this structure have upon the
message Williams hopes to make?
Thomas Harriot (1560–1621)
Born in England and educated at Oxford, Thomas Harriot was
employed as a young man by the explorer Sir Walter Ralegh. In 1585
he accompanied Ralegh’s New World expedition to Roanoke, where,
as a naturalist, he collaborated with painter John White to study the
landscape and its inhabitants. Although Harriot must have kept notebooks, none survives. The existing record of his observations is A Brief
and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1588), an optimistic account of native culture that seems to have been written at
Ralegh’s direction. Although this work lacks candor—Harriot avoids
mentioning how the colonists fled a brutal storm by ship—it does
acknowledge how the Indians were gradually devastated by disease
and provides detailed descriptions of these native peoples in their
soon-to-be-changing natural environment.
Harriot’s account provides some of the only information we possess on the Roanoke people, who perished from disease soon after
the Roanoke colony ceased to exist. South of the Potomac River the
Virginian Algonquian peoples were united in the Powhatan Confederacy in the late 1500s. The leader of this confederacy, Powhatan,
would eventually pledge his daughter to John Rolfe; and, if we are to
believe John Smith, this same Indian princess, Pocahontas, saved
Smith’s life. Harriot’s and John White’s accounts provide us with
important cultural information. Colonial accounts by travelers such
as Harriot contribute to our limited understanding of the Native
American communities whose own records have not survived.
T E A C H I N G
John White, The Manner of
Attire and Painting Themselves, When
They Goe to Their General Huntings or
at Theire Solemne Feasts (c. 1585),
courtesy of The British Museum.
[7429]
T I P S
■ Have your students write an ethnographic account of their own
family, class, or school as if they were outside observers. You may want
to have them do this in two stages: first, have them compose a description of behavior and practices without any analysis; second, have them
switch papers with another student and analyze the “meanings” of the
group. This short-circuits students’ assumptions that they already
know these meanings, and it can viscerally implant the sense of unease
or even invasion on the part of the object of the ethnography.
■ Students often assume that Renaissance explorers used our own
understandings of race and “otherness” when categorizing Native
Americans, even though our notions of race today are much indebted
to Enlightenment (i.e., eighteenth-century) thought. Show your students Konrad Kolble’s map of the New World, which depicts four
famous European explorers at its corners, and ask them to identify
what makes these figures, literally and conceptually, different from
H A R R I O T
W E B
A R C H I V E
Konrad Kolble, Replica of a Map
of the Americas with Portraits of
Christopher Columbus, Amerigo
Vespucci, Ferdinand Magellan and
Francisco Pizarro Around Border (1970),
courtesy of the Library of Congress [LCUSZ62-89908]. In Konrad Kolble’s facsimile of a map published in 1600 by
Theodor de Bry, we see four of the most
famous European explorers framing the
New World, a testimony to its assumed
possession by the Old.
[1368]
T H O M A S
H A R R I O T
33
John White, The Manner of Their
Fishing (c. 1585), courtesy of the John
Carter Brown Library, Brown University.
One of John White’s drawings not taken
directly from real life: he shows a dip net
and spear (daytime fishing techniques)
and a fire in a canoe (used to attract fish
at night). White combined disparate
New World fishing methods and a mix
of species in this and other paintings.
[7429] John White, The Manner of Their
Attire and Painting Themselves, When
They Goe to Their General Huntings or
at Theire Solemne Feasts (c. 1585),
courtesy of The British Museum. This is a
portrait of an Algonquian Indian (either
Secotan or Pomeiooc) from Virginia.
Elite families and chiefs were elaborately
decorated with paint, beads, and quills
to signal their status and power. The
pose, taken from sixteenth-century
European portraits, emphasizes the
importance of the subject and the
occasion.
[1900]
the depictions of Native Americans? What does this map infer about
what makes someone civilized or savage? How are these categories reflected in White’s drawings and Harriot’s descriptions?
Q U E S T I O N S
Comprehension: What does Harriot emphasize about North America
and its native inhabitants?
Comprehension: What precisely does Harriot object to in the religion
of Native Americans?
Context: A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia is
largely an advertisement for European settlement in the New World.
How do you see Harriot constructing his description of the New
World in order to make it seem attractive to ambitious Europeans?
How does his view of the New World compare to Williams’s?
Context: To what extent is A Brief and True Report a conduct book for
the English? Conduct books were manuals that sought to inculcate
proper etiquette, behavior, and therefore values in their readers. In
what ways does Harriot advise the English to behave in the New
World?
Context: Compare Harriot’s description of the Roanokes’ dress with
“The Manner of Their Attire and Painting Themselves” [7429]. Has
White taken any liberties or filled in any gaps?
Exploration: Like Bernal Díaz del Castillo (Unit 2), Harriot emphasizes that he is giving a “true” report. How does Harriot establish
the veracity of his report? Does he give any clues to what a false
report might be? How do his attempts at establishing authority
compare to those of Díaz del Castillo?
Exploration: How do Harriot’s objections to native religion show
his unspoken assumptions about what is spiritual and what is
material?
Suggested Teaching Pairs
L U C I
T A P A H O N S O
A N D
L O U I S E
E R D R I C H
Both Luci Tapahonso and Louise Erdrich emphasize the relationship
of female power to Native American culture. Tapahonso’s poems
explore the relationship among generations of women, the image of
birth as a renewal and a healing, and the power of such mythical
female figures as Dawn Woman. She explores a worldview that itself
emphasizes connection and change. You may want to contrast this
female-centered space with the white town in “Fleur.” At the beginning of “Fleur” Erdrich casts the male Chippewa as frightened by the
spiritual connection Fleur has to nature, marked most clearly by her
supposed multiple deaths and resurrections. Fleur (whose very name
implies a link to nature) makes the men panic. Even Pauline, although
a less sympathetic character than Fleur, manages to have a profound
effect on her world and certainly can’t be considered weak or yielding.
You may also want to compare Tapahonso’s verse style with the light-
34
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hearted Chippewa love songs, or compare their view of gender relations with that in Erdrich’s work.
L E S L I E
M A R M O N
S I L K O
A N D
S I M O N
J .
O R T I Z
In their works Leslie Marmon Silko and Simon J. Ortiz engage with
the intersection of modern warfare and native cultures. Tayo, the protagonist of Silko’s Ceremony, takes a journey away from the European
American contexts of World War II and alcoholism toward the native
contexts of the Ts’eh, a mountain spirit. This journey is healing, a
movement away from the corruption and destruction of the West and
toward wholeness, harmony, and peace. Ortiz paints a powerful yet
simple image of European American violence in “8:50 AM Ft. Lyons
VAH”: the straight line of the hospital wall blocks the view of the geese.
That line stands not only for the hospital built to cope with the ravages of Western war, but also for the entirety of the West’s antinatural
worldview, where the living contours of the land and its creatures are
cut and divided by the rigid measures of an arrogant technology. Both
writers emphasize the power of the oral tradition and its constant
adaptation to new contexts and experiences. Have your students compare the differences between the oral traditions of these closely related
communities.
S T O R I E S
O F
T H E
A N D
T H E
A N D
T H O M A S
B E G I N N I N G
N A R R A T I V E S
O F
O F
R O G E R
T H E
W O R L D
W I L L I A M S
H A R R I O T
Stories of the Beginning of the World and the narratives of Roger
Williams and Thomas Harriot provide two different views of the world
and of native peoples. In the Stories of the Beginning of the World, we
hear, through translators, of the cosmographies of the Iroquois and
Pima peoples. These accounts contrast with Harriot’s and Williams’s
views on how native cultures (specifically the Narragansett and
Roanoke) are structured and what the communities value. It is worth
calling students’ attention to the differences in content and form of
these accounts. In addition, you may want to discuss the different
goals of the stories and Renaissance travel accounts. While the creation stories aim to integrate the listener into the community and its
worldview, both Williams’s and Harriot’s works are in a sense advertisements for European settlement of the New World. While neither
author’s narrative is virulently racist and ethnocentric in the ways of
many of their contemporaries’ works (compare, say, the works of John
Smith and William Bradford, two important Englishmen who have little or no sympathy for the Indians), they still aim to assimilate the
“other” into the European cosmography.
B L A C K
E L K
A N D
G H O S T
D A N C E
S O N G S
Black Elk’s narrative is usefully read alongside the Ghost Dance songs.
It recounts the period of the Ghost Dance and the devastating experi-
S U G G E S T E D
T E A C H I N G
PA I R S
35
ence of Wounded Knee, and it provides important contextual information on the goals of the Ghost Dance movement. Black Elk’s vision
might also be usefully compared to that of the Ghost Dance songs, as
in many ways it signals the continuing renewal of Lakota culture, long
after the Ghost Dance movement has ended. Students should pay
attention to the use of repetition and significant numbers in both the
vision and the songs. These texts illustrate the ways in which native
spiritual traditions often appropriated and reinvented Christianity.
Students should pay attention to the messianic nature of the Ghost
Dance songs and their use of the Shaker (Christian) tradition, as well
as to Black Elk’s own continuing dedication to a Lakota brand of
Catholicism. These texts provide a superb opportunity to discuss the
problems inherent in translation. To what extent is the power of vision
in the songs lost in the movement into English and into a Western “literary” form?
CORE CONTEXTS
“God Is Red”: The Clashes and Contacts of Native Religion
and Christianity
John Eliot, First page, Genesis
from the Holy Bible: Containing the Old
Testament and the New (1663), courtesy
of the Annenberg Rare Book and
Manuscript Library, University of
Pennsylvania.
[2466]
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Although Vine Deloria Jr. argues in his classic and polemical book God
Is Red: A Native View of Religion that Christianity and Native religions
are polar opposites, since the very first days of European-Indian contact, many Native Americans have adopted and adapted Christianity for their own purposes. As scholars have noted, native religions
always sought out new forms of power that could be incorporated
into their religious practices. Thus while white New England missionaries often assumed that they were converting natives into “red
Puritans,” practitioners of Native Christianity most often created an
emergent religion: one that added new spiritual practices to an existing framework.
Although there are probably as many different forms of Native
Christianity as there are Native Christians, a few basic generalizations
provide an important starting point for understanding the forms taken
by this melding of religions. For instance, Deloria argues that the fundamental difference between Christianity and native religion is an orientation to time in the former and an orientation to space in the latter.
That is, Christianity is a time-based religion, predicated on the ideas
that the universe has a definite beginning and a definite end and that
human life is a sort of “dress rehearsal” for the last judgment and
afterlife-placement. Native religion, Deloria claims, is space-based: it
grows out of and accounts for the particular landscape of the tribe,
has no conception of a primordial time when humans were pure but
then fell into sin, and anticipates no future of a radically different
order (as Christianity posits will come about at the Second Coming of
Christ). For native religion, humans have always been and will always
be the way they are, and the world will always be more or less as it is;
even the afterlife is primarily a pleasant version of life in the tribe. Our
job, writes Deloria, is to deal ethically and responsibly with each other
and with the web of all creation to which we are here and now connected—the land, the animals, the plants, the spirits of the ancestors—
rather than to prepare for some future moment in which all will be
transformed. Deloria’s generalizations do not hold true for all native
cultures: some tribes such as the Pomo of California do speak of a time
in which the world was radically different. Even though Deloria’s
abstractions have been hotly debated by scholars, this healing vision
of spiritual practice is reflected in the work of many contemporary
Native American writers, especially and most elaborately in Silko’s
Ceremony, but also in the poetry of Ortiz and Tapahonso.
Native versions of Christianity often present a mixture of these two
religious outlooks. For example, a popular story for missionaries was
the idea that Native Americans were one of the lost tribes of Israelites.
This story fit with the notion of Christianity as a time-based religion:
from the missionaries’ perspective, American Indians’ history began
with the arrival of the whites and moved forward with conversion and
the eventual return of Christ. For early Native American Christian converts, however, the story was not so simple. Many, such as Guaman
Poma of Peru and William Apess (Unit 4), argued that Native
Americans were already Christians upon the arrival of the whites—in
fact, they were much better Christians than the Europeans! This
notion reflects the perspective that humans have always been and will
always be the way they are and that the world will always be more or
less as it is. Similarly, movements such as the Ghost Dance combine
Christian apocalyptic thought with a basic faith in the interconnectedness of the land, the animals, the plants, the spirits of the ancestors.
By appropriating elements of Christianity, Ghost Dance dancers and
singers aimed to fight the enemy with its own weapons, in this case
with religious firearms.
The history of Christianity and Native American communities has
not always been uplifting. Since the earliest days of European settlement, Native Americans have been the object of strenuous conversion
attempts that nevertheless failed to guarantee them equal treatment
either before the law or in American religious life. Indeed, Native
American converts were often viewed with suspicion both by their
own communities and by European settlers: for example, Mary
Rowlandson (Unit 3) has only unkind things to say about “Praying
Indians” and indeed most praying Indians were forcibly interned and
starved on an island in Boston Harbor during King Philip’s War.
Samson Occom (Unit 3), a Mohegan from Connecticut who was converted to Christianity at sixteen and later became a popular preacher
in America and England, recalls similar mistreatment. In his A Short
Narrative of My Life (1768), he sums up the years of discrimination
and abuse he suffered: “I must Say, ‘I believe [my mistreatment by
white Christians] is because I am a poor Indian.’ I Can’t help that God
has made me So; I did not make my self so.—”
Anonymous, John Collier and
Hopi Men (c. 1920), courtesy of CSULB,
National Archives.
[4210]
“ G O D
W E B
I S
R E D ”
A R C H I V E
N. C. Wyeth, The Supplicant
(1919), courtesy of Reed College Library
Special Collections, Portland, Oregon.
Illustration from the N. C. Wyeth edition
of Last of the Mohicans. Here Cora
pleads with the Delaware sachem
Tamenund for the life of her sister, Alice.
The theme of white women at the mercy
of “savage” natives was made popular
by early American captivity narratives.
[2466] John Eliot, First page, Genesis
from the Holy Bible: Containing the
Old Testament and the New (1663),
courtesy of the Annenberg Rare Book
and Manuscript Library, University of
Pennsylvania. This translation of the first
page of Genesis into Massachusett an
Algonquian language, was done with
the help of John Sassamon
(Massachuset), whose murder in 1675
for being an English informant began
King Philip’s War.
[2836] Bernard Picard, Illustration from
Cérémonies et Coutumes Religieuses
des Peuples Idolâtres (1723), courtesy of
the Jay I. Kislak Foundation, Inc.
European depictions of Native American
ceremonies, such as this one from
Picard’s six-volume masterpiece on
world religions, often tell us more about
Europeans and their anxieties than about
the actual experiences they record.
[2059]
“ G O D
I S
R E D ”
37
Joseph-Francois Lafitau, An
Iroquois Funeral as Observed by a
French Missionary, Early 1700s (1724),
courtesy of the Library of Congress, Rare
Books and Special Collections. Detail
from Moeurs des Sauvages Amériquians
Comparées aux Moeurs des Premiers
Temps (Customs of the American Indians
Compared with the Customs of Primitive
Times [in Europe]). This drawing provides insight into Iroquois death rituals.
[4210] Anonymous, John Collier and
Hopi Men (c. 1920), courtesy of CSULB,
National Archives. Indian Commissioner
John Collier helped fight the U.S. government’s assimilationist policies and
argued for the protection of American
Indian cultures, religions, and languages. He is best known for the Indian
Reorganization Act of 1934.
[6783] Edward S. Curtis, Altar Peyote
with Rattle (Osage) (1930), courtesy of
the Library of Congress [E77.C97]. The
Osage Indians of Missouri were ardent
practioners of the Peyote Religion.
Ceremonies include a prayer meeting in
a house designed for the ritual and the
singing of Peyote songs. Taken from a
cactus, peyote buttons have hallucinogenic properties. Peyote cults entered
the United States from Mexico in the
nineteenth century.
[7588] George Catlin, Dog Feast, from
The Manners, Customs, and Condition
of the North American Indians (1842),
courtesy of Tilt and Bogue, London. In
Letter no. 28, Catlin remarks, “The dogfeast is given, I believe, by all tribes in
North America; and by them all, I think,
this faithful animal, as well as the horse,
is sacrificed in several different ways, to
appease offended Spirits or Deities”
(Letters and Notes on the Manners,
Customs, and Condition of the North
American Indians).
[3249]
Q U E S T I O N S
Comprehension: According to Deloria, what is one basic difference
between Native American religions and Christianity?
Comprehension: In what way does the Ghost Dance religion display
the influence of Christianity?
Comprehension: What is an emergent religion?
Context: Find all the moments where the contemporary native writers
in this unit blur the sacred and the secular. For example, is
Tapahonso’s “A Breeze Swept Through” a religious poem? Why or
why not? In what sense might Ortiz’s “8:50 AM Ft. Lyons VAH,”
despite its basically secular surface, be religious in a native sense?
Context: Using Ts’eh as an example, discuss the role gender plays in
Pueblo religion.
Context: Reformer John Collier (1884–1968) created the American
Indian Defense Association in 1923 to fight the assimilationist policies of the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887, and he was instrumental in
salvaging religious rights for Indians. Consider the archive image of
him and two Hopi men: what does their body language say about
their relationship, and by extension the relationship in the early
twentieth century between white and native cultures?
Exploration: You may never have seen a version of the Bible written
in a nonmodern language, as in the archive image of the Bible
translated into Massachuset, a native language. The Bible was originally written mostly in ancient Hebrew and Greek, so even the contemporary versions with which you might be more familiar are
translations and therefore at some distance from the original. How
do you think translation of sacred texts might affect their meaning?
Does this “Indian Bible” seem less strange than, say, Chippewa
songs in English?
Exploration: Compare Mary Rowlandson’s vision of the Narragansetts and “Praying Indians” to Roger Williams’s vision of the Narragansetts. What is the relationship between Puritanism and
Narragansett religion in each text? What is the potential for conversion?
Exploration: Why do you think someone like Samson Occom would
have converted to Christianity? How is it that a person can be
brought up with one worldview and then later change it? Occom
says that he was never really treated fairly by white Christians, but
in what ways do you think he might have nevertheless benefited
from being a Christian?
Exploration: Challenge Deloria’s claims about Native American religions. For example, to what extent is myth an example of a “primordial time”?
Healing Arts: The Navajo Night Chant (Nightway)
Healing songs and chants are an important genre in Native American
oral traditions. As a general rule, songs and chants seek to re-create a
state rather than an event. Songs and chants are also rarely told in a
38
U N I T
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N AT I V E
V O I C E S
vacuum: the Night Chant, for example, is composed of a whole series
of practices—including dances, the construction of sandpaintings, and
the use of prayer sticks—that constitute a nine-day healing ceremony
traditionally performed by the Navajo. Although the Night Chant is
specific to the Navajo, it provides an important example of the interrelatedness of language, healing, and spirituality in native traditions. It
is one of the great masterpieces of the oral tradition.
The Night Chant is a “way” insofar as it attempts not just to break
into the natural course of an illness, but in facts sets the “patient” on
the path or way toward reestablishing the natural harmony and balance that allow for health. For the Navajo, who migrated to the
Southwest from the northern lands sometime between seven hundred
and one thousand years ago, the Night Chant is one of many ceremonial chants meant to affect the world in some concrete manner. The
Night Chant is a healing ceremony, a treatment for illness, especially
paralysis, blindness, and deafness. In the words of anthropologist and
ethno-grapher James C. Faris, Night Chant practices are those that
“order, harmonize and re-establish and situate social relations.” Hence
the ceremony emphasizes humans’ ability to control their world and
their responsibility to use that control in the service of balance,
respect, and healing. If the Holy People—the ancestors or the spirits—
inflict suffering, it is because people have broken the rules; the Night
Chant attempts to put the rules back together, to restore the conditions conducive to order, balance, and health.
The ceremony begins at sunset when the chanter, the medicine man
who conducts the ceremony and the only one with the knowledge of
proper Night Chant practice, enters the home of the patient, the one
who is to be cured. After a ritual call for participation (“Come on the
trail of song”)—which emphasizes the role of not only the patient but
all guests present to form a community of healing—the patient sits to
the west of a fire. There follow elaborate chants, songs, and dances.
The first four days are devoted to purification, after which the Holy
People are called upon. On the sunrise of the ninth day, the patient
is invited to look eastward and greet the dawn, representative of renewal. The chant is fundamentally narrative, although not necessarily
continuous, and its specific details and enactments vary greatly among
different medicine men and the particular needs of the patient. Faris
emphasizes the flexibility and fluidity of the elements of the story.
There is no central episode that must be retold in all cases for the ceremony to be effective; rather, specific episodes arise from local situations, and no single medicine man possesses the knowledge of every
possible episode. But there is generally a basic storyline, which tells of
a long-ago cultural hero of particular visionary power who gathers the
details of how to properly conduct the ceremony from the Holy
People. The Night Chant is therefore in part a perpetual retelling of
itself; it is neither entertainment nor abstract teaching, but the ritual
reenactment of its own origin. In this origin is the way toward order,
which is the way toward healing. Through this retelling the singer
aims to bring about hózhó, or holiness, harmony, beauty.
The sandpaintings reflect this goal of balance and harmony seek-
Anonymous, Rattle Shock Rite
(1980–2002), courtesy of the Museum
of Northern Arizona Photo Archives.
[5951]
Anonymous, Whirling logs
(n.d.), from J. C. Faris, The Nightway: A
History and a History of Documentation
of a Navajo Ceremonial (1990), courtesy of the Museum of Northern Arizona
Photo Archives.
[5953]
H E A L I N G
A R T S
39
Anonymous, Navajo Shaman
Drypainting a Remedy (n.d.), courtesy of
the American Museum of Natural
History.
[5742]
H E A L I N G
W E B
Q U E S T I O N S
A R T S
A R C H I V E
Anonymous, Two Navaho
Shaman Dry Painting to Cure and Illness
(n.d.), courtesy of the American Museum
of Natural History. Navajo sand paintings, or “dry” paintings, are meant to
summon and embody the spirits of the
holy people and therefore are wiped
away immediately after the Night Chant
ceremony.
[5742] Anonymous, Navajo Shaman
Drypainting a Remedy (n.d.), courtesy of
the American Musuem of Natural
History. The Navajo Night Chant is a
nine-day healing ceremony that includes
dances, sandpaintings, and prayer
sticks. Sandpaintings reflect the Navajo
value of hózhó, or holiness, harmony,
beauty.
[5743] Anonymous, Navajo Shaman
Puts Finishing Touches on Remedy
Painting (n.d.), courtesy of the American
Museum of Natural History. The Navajo
use sandpaintings in an elaborate, nineday ceremony designed to cure illness
by restoring order, balance, and harmony. The paintings are wiped away as
soon as the ritual is complete.
[5741]
40
U N I T
1 ,
N AT I V E
ing. Created for the ceremony and immediately
wiped away, the sandpaintings elaborately echo
some of the main patterns and images of the chant.
As sacred artifacts, they are not intended to be
recorded through film or painting. Because they are
designed specifically to attract the attention of (and
eventually embody) the Holy People, it would be a
dangerous violation to allow them to exist after the
proper time for spiritual contact had passed. Those
included in the American Passages archive were
painted by a priest based on sketches taken from the
work of a medicine man who authorized them to be
shown to the public. Reproductions such as these
have usually been altered to diffuse their power.
Surviving notes suggest that there are several inaccuracies in the Rattle Shock Rite image; for
example, the owl feathers on the central figure should be spotted and
decorations should be added to the belt of the central figure. Like the
multiple levels of transmission that Black Elk’s narrative went through
(see above), the various mediations these images have undergone continue to define a communal center of identity and knowledge in opposition to the outsider—however sympathetic he or she may be.
V O I C E S
Comprehension: Which tribe is the Night Chant associated with?
Comprehension: What is the Night Chant used for?
Comprehension: What acts does the Night Chant involve?
Context: In Silko’s Ceremony, Betonie is a mixed-blood Navajo healer.
In what sense can you see the Night Chant or something like it
being used in this novel? How is what Tayo goes through like the
ritual described above? To what extent does his ceremony take into
consideration contemporary sources of illness? How does it seek to
deal with these sources of pain?
Context: Examine one of the sandpaintings in the archive. How does
it seek to achieve harmony and balance? How does it exemplify
hózhó? Compare the strategies it uses for achieving harmony and
balance to those in Tapahonso’s poetry.
Context: Examine the Rattle Shock Rite image in the archive. Note
that it is centered around four figures that represent gods of the
North, South, East, and West. Why might these figures be important in Ceremony? Why do you think four might be such an essential number for many Native American beliefs (as opposed, say, to
the three and seven of Christianity)?
Context: Compare the text of the Night Chant to that of the Ghost
Dance songs. What strategies does each use to achieve harmony
and balance? How are these strategies related to the goal of each
text?
Exploration: Why might a Navajo not want a non–Native American to
know the details of the Night Chant? Does this seem reasonable to
you? Are there things about your life you wouldn’t want others to
know, even though their knowledge would not affect your life?
Navajos believe that knowing things about people can affect people.
If knowledge could give people power over you, would you be less
likely to give people access to personal information?
Exploration: Do you think the sandpainting images in the archive are
aesthetically pleasing? How do you know “good” art when you see
it? For example, to what extent is it reasonable to assume that realistic figures constitute good art?
Singing Mothers and Storytelling Grandfathers: The Art and
Meaning of Pueblo Pottery
Pottery is an important Native American art form that dates back
thousands of years. As Simon J. Ortiz notes, “[Pottery making] has
more to do with a sense of touching than with seeing because fingers
have to know the texture of clay and how the pottery is formed from
lines of shale, strata and earth movements.” Pueblo pottery is considered some of the most beautiful, and it has deep ties to storytelling traditions. Pueblo cultures, along with those of the Navajo and Apache,
constitute the dominant native traditions in the American Southwest.
Pottery dates back over fifteen hundred years to the Anasazi period,
but in the past few decades there has been a tremendous revival in
pottery-making among the Pueblo people, led in part by the Cochiti
Pueblo potter Helen Cordero and her Storyteller dolls. Cordero’s pottery challenged the appropriation of Native American art by white art
collectors.
Native works of art and craft have a troubled history in mainstream American culture. Like so much
of native culture, objects such as bowls and dolls
were at least potentially sacred: if used in certain ritual contexts, they acted as embodied prayers to
ancestors or gods. The kachinas in the archive are
good examples of this: they are dolls, but they
embody a ritual significance as well [8110, 8209]. As
such, they were not to be handled and scrutinized
by curious Europeans, even investigative anthropologists. Nevertheless, soon after the introduction of
railroads into the Southwest, Indians (many of
whom found themselves desperately poor after having their traditional ways of life disrupted) began
producing pottery and other artifacts for European
commercial consumption. This trade, which began
in the 1880s, allowed a modest income for many
Pueblo and other native peoples. In most cases, the
objects differed in subtle but profoundly significant ways from the
ones intended for tribal use, and so did not directly endanger the
tribe’s traditions: this practice continues to be a concern for some
native writers who incorporate traditional material in their work.
S I N G I N G
M O T H E R S
A N D
Anonymous, Rattle Shock Rite
(1980–2002), courtesy of the Museum
of Northern Arizona Photo Archives.
Sandpaintings are used in Navajo ceremonies and are designed to attract the
attention of the Holy People. This reproduction has been altered to diffuse its
power.
[5953] Anonymous, Whirling Logs
(n.d.), from J. C. Faris, The Nightway: A
History and a History of Documentation
of a Navajo Ceremonial (1990), courtesy of the Museum of Northern Arizona
Photo Archives. This reproduction of a
Navajo sandpainting differs from the
original in subtle but significant ways.
The story told in Nightway Chant
changes with every shaman and patient.
Sandpaintings like this often reflect main
themes or images from the narrative
thread of the ritual.
[5951]
Henry Peabody, Pottery in the
Interior of an Acoma Dwelling, New
Mexico (c. 1900), courtesy of the
National Archives and Records
Administration.
[5890]
S T O R Y T E L L I N G
G R A N D F AT H E R S
41
S I N G I N G
W E B
M O T H E R S
A R C H I V E
Henry Peabody, Pottery in the
Interior of an Acoma Dwelling, New
Mexico (c. 1900), courtesy of the
National Archives and Records
Administration (NARA). Pottery is an
important part of Pueblo culture. Even
clay is believed to be endowed with a
“spirit” of its own. Here we see the
inside of a traditional Pueblo home in
which one family’s roof was another’s
floor.
[6756] Anonymous, Frontispiece from
The Land of the Pueblos (1891), courtesy of J. B. Alden, New York. Although
Pueblo pottery has long been considered sacred and used in rituals, many
pots today are made for the tourist trade
and for non-Pueblo collectors. Potter
Helen Cordero, however, rejects the
Western sense of “art” as ornamental or
merely entertaining.
[7312] Anonymous, Video of corn
dancers (c. 1940), courtesy of the
National Archives and Records
Administration. The people of Acoma
have been making pottery for centuries,
both for everyday use and for rituals
such as the Corn Dance. The Corn
Dance is held annually at a tribal site
near Albuquerque, New Mexico. The
dance was given by the supernatural
Mother, who wanted her people to have
a public dance which all could enjoy.
Prayer sticks are used in the dance to
bring legendary hero Koshari. Sacred
clowns painted in black and white join
the dance.
[8113] Huron Tribe, Pair of dolls
(1830–50), courtesy of the Portland Art
Museum, gift of Elizabeth Cole Butler
[88.43.6-7]. Dolls like these, made by
the Huron Tribe in the mid-nineteenth
century, played a number of roles in traditional Native American culture, including being used to teach children their
people’s history. The dolls were made
from wood, wool, and cotton cloth and
were adorned with metal and glass
beads, leather, and real hair.
[8116] Acoma and Santo Domingo,
Jars (c. 1900, 1920), courtesy of the
Portland Art Museum, Elizabeth Cole
Butler Collection. Soon after the introduction of railroads into the Southwest,
[5890]
42
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N AT I V E
V O I C E S
Commercial production had the effect of making native-made objects
into either mysterious oddities or “artworks” whose consumers had
no sense of their sacred origin. Hence, for much of the twentieth century, many Indians felt invaded and exploited by the dissemination of
their artifacts into white America.
As anthropologist Barbara Babcock and photographers Guy
Monthan and Doris Monthan detail in their book The Pueblo
Storyteller, in the late 1950s Helen Cordero began producing pottery
that recaptured and transformed the traditional Pueblo ways of art.
Cordero turned to the traditional construction of objects that possessed deep cultural significance: these are called fetishes (if used in
ceremony), figurines, or effigies. Traditionally, clay for the Pueblo was
a living substance with its own spirit, so that anything constructed
from clay acquires, as Babcock writes, “a kind of personal and conscious existence as it [is] being made.” All Pueblo ceremonies used
clay objects, which are closely associated with the original creation of
life in every known Pueblo creation story. Some of these objects were
vessels and some were human figures—for example, those known as
“kachina dolls.” The dolls stand for kachinas, masked supernatural
spirits who are said to enter into the bodies of Pueblo dancers during
ceremonies and act as conduits between the world of humans and the
world of spirits or gods.
Another such figure was the “Singing Mother” found among the
Cochiti. These figures, which may not have been ceremonial but certainly partook of the Pueblo assumptions that made ceremonies possible, are the ones that Cordero’s Storyteller dolls echo and revise. The
figures of a mother singing to her child evoke fertility; as Babcock
writes, they make “the connection between human reproduction and
other, life-giving forms of generation.” As such, childbirth and child
raising are linked to the passing down of stories and songs across the
generations, emphasizing the interlinking of all creation, including
the inextricability of human culture and the natural world. Between
1900 and 1960, Pueblo artifacts made for trade were weak in quality
and few in number. But Cordero first created a figure that evoked the
Singing Mother on commission for a white folk art collector, and in
the process managed to transform the old tradition into a living art
form for the present. As always in native traditions, she emphasized
the local and the specific: she changed the mother figure to a male,
modeled on her grandfather whom she remembers as a powerful storyteller, and she added multiple children to the figures (there are as
many as thirty on some pieces). None of her hundreds of figures are
identical, nor are the many figures created by Pueblo potters inspired
by her work. They are images of the passing down of tradition that are
themselves the evolution of tradition. For potters like Cordero, the
importance of the clay and its relationship to the stories of the oral
tradition help keep the art traditions alive.
Q U E S T I O N S
Comprehension: What does the Singing Mother represent?
Comprehension: What is a kachina?
Comprehension: When and why did Helen Cordero begin producing
her pottery?
Context: How can you see Native American artistic traditions being
kept alive but transformed in the contemporary writers discussed
in this unit? For example, how is Ceremony not only a reiteration of
healing rituals but also a specific comment on the effects of World
War II on Native Americans? What is Betonie’s relationship to the
Navajo community? How does this inform the way he uses ceremonies?
Exploration: It is a curious fact that there is very little evidence of
Pueblo figurative ceramics from about 1500 to about 1875. This
happens to correspond to the period of intense Spanish colonialism
in the American Southwest. Why do you think we have this gap in
the historical record?
Exploration: How is passing down traditions analogous to childbirth?
In what ways are these acts similar, and in what ways different?
Exploration: Could those Pueblo who made pottery for white tourists
be considered to be “selling out”? Would you have done the same
thing? Does our contemporary culture show examples of oncesacred objects or ideas being used for profit?
Indians (many of whom became desperately poor after having their traditional
ways of life disrupted) began producing
pottery and other artifacts for sale.
[8122] Santo Domingo Tribe, Jar (n.d.),
courtesy of the Portland Art Museum, gift
of Elizabeth Cole Butler [1481]. Native
American pottery, traditionally sacred or
utilitarian, began to be produced in its
contemporary “decorative” form in the
late nineteenth century. In the 1920s
and 1930s, dealers, archaeologists, and
tribal members formed the Indian Arts
Fund to collect traditional Pueblo pottery
and encourage its production.
EXTENDED CONTEXTS
Native Weavers and the Art of Basketry
He breathed on her and gave her something that she could not see or
hear or smell or touch, and it was preserved in a little basket, and by
all of the arts of design and skilled handwork.
—Kotai’aqan, Columbia River Basketry
Basketry, like pottery, is an art that is found in numerous Native
American cultures but differs greatly from tribe to tribe. As Mary
Dodge Schlick, the author of Columbia River Basketry: Gift of the
Ancestors, Gift of the Earth, points out, for centuries baskets have been
part of vast trade networks in which friends and acquaintances meet,
gamble, and trade food stuffs and goods: baskets are one way of carrying these valuables. Baskets also play important roles in spiritual and
medicinal rituals, as attested to in Greg Sarris’s work on Pomo basket
weaver and healer Mabel McKay. McKay wove her baskets for collectors and for general consumption, and all were made under the guidance of a spirit who taught her healing songs and imbued her baskets
with a spiritual power. Baskets like the Pomo feather baskets featured
in the archive [6303, 8118, 8119] should be thought of as spiritual, as
well as material, objects.
As archaeologist A. L. Kroeber and many others have noted, Pomo
N AT I V E
W E A V E R S
A N D
Anonymous, Pomo feather gift
basket (n.d.), courtesy of the Douglas F.
Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed
College.
[6303]
T H E
A R T
O F
B A S K E T R Y
43
Anonymous, Water jar, pitched
with horsehair lug handles (n.d.), courtesy of the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial
Art Gallery, Reed College.
[6307]
N A T I V E
W E B
W E A V E R S
A R C H I V E
[6303] Anonymous, Pomo feather gift
basket (n.d.), courtesy of the Douglas F.
Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed
College. The series of quill stitches in
this coiled Pomo basket indicates the
weaver’s desire to continue her work
during a menstrual period, which would
be bad luck if she did not substitute bird
quills for plant materials.
[6307] Anonymous, Water jar, pitched
with horsehair lug handles (n.d.), courtesy of the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial
Art Gallery, Reed College. Basketry
objects found on the North American
continent have been dated to as far
back as 9000 B.C.
[6310] Anonymous, Coiled basket tray,
rattlesnake design (n.d.), courtesy of
Reed College, Douglas F. Cooley
Memorial Art Gallery. Like pottery, basketry is important for storing and transferring food and other supplies.
[7416] Anonymous, Tray, Apache, San
Carlos, Arizona (n.d.), courtesy of the
New York State Historical Association,
Thaw Collection. Beginning in the late
1800s, many Native Americans used the
American flag as a decorative motif in
their arts and crafts. Notice the crossed
44
baskets are among the finest in the world. He writes, “To the Pomo,
these served as gifts and treasures, and above all, they were destroyed
in honor of the dead.” The Pomo live in Northern California and are
known for the intricacy of their baskets, particularly their beaded baskets, feather baskets, and miniature baskets [6303]. Sometimes the
baskets held medicines, but other times nothing at all; as Susan Billy,
a Pomo basket weaver, explains, “People frequently ask me what these
ceremonial baskets hold. They did not have to hold anything, because
the basket itself was all that was needed. The basket contained the
prayers and the wonderful, good energy that made it a ceremonial basket.” Gift baskets were given to people of stature or people with whom
one wanted to cement a relationship [8081, 8119]. Small gift baskets
were sometimes worn.
Other Native American communities, including the Nez Perce of
Oregon and Washington, also wore baskets. Baskets hats, such as the
one in the archive [8118], play a part in the oral tradition of the
Columbia River peoples. For example, in one Wishxam myth,
Grandmother uses a basket hat to teach Little Raccoon about the consequences of misbehavior. In many Native American communities,
baskets play an important role in women’s culture. Knowledge of how
to make a basket hat, among other skills, was a sign that a young
woman had reached adulthood in Columbia River culture. Women
still wear these hats at powwows and other ceremonies.
U N I T
1 ,
N AT I V E
V O I C E S
Q U E S T I O N S
Comprehension: How is basketry like pottery in its significance for
native cultures?
Comprehension: How are Pomo baskets potentially spiritual as well
as material objects?
Context: In his book The Gift, Marcel Mauss argues that gifts must be
reciprocated in honor and prestige, if not in kind. How might the
Pomo gift baskets create a reciprocal relationship with the giver?
How does this compare to other instances of giving, in, say, Leslie
Marmon Silko’s Ceremony?
Context: Look carefully at one of the baskets in the archive and take
note of the strategies it uses to create order and harmony. Compare
it to one of the coyote or trickster tales in The Norton Anthology of
American Literature. How does Coyote undo society’s order? Is balance reinstated by the end of the tale?
Exploration: If baskets such as the Pomo gift baskets have a “wonderful, good energy,” do we have any right to keep them in museums?
What do you think happens to this energy in museums? How
should items with spiritual significance be displayed? (You may
want to read the essay by Greg Sarris, “A Culture Under Glass: The
Pomo Basket,” in Keeping Slug Woman Alive.)
Exploration: What women’s traditions exist in your family? How are
they passed along from one generation to the next?
Sacred Play: Gambling in Native Cultures
Gambling has long been a part of Native American cultures. Hand
games, like gift exchange, are an important way to redistribute goods
among community members. Gambling is not all fun and games, however. In the oral traditions of native peoples, gambler figures, like
tricksters, tend to be threshold figures who can move between the
world of the living and the world of the dead. Gambler myths, however, tend to have a more gothic edge than trickster tales. Gamblers
often preside over the world of the dead, rather than merely visit it,
and they are often associated with the end of the world. In contrast,
the transgressive nature of the trickster is often a creative or generative force. Thus, gambler stories often are about an individual or community facing fear of annihilation. In Leslie Marmon Silko’s
Ceremony, for example, the tribes’ Cultural Hero challenges the
Gambler. The stakes are high: the Hero works on behalf of the community, but wages his life. These crucial encounters dramatize the
people’s belief about how the original world was altered to its current
form.
As Kathryn Gabriel points out in Gambler Way, gambling can be
seen as a way of tapping into cosmic forces. At times an attempt to
gain insight into or even control the otherwise unpredictable future,
the outcomes of games can suggest what the cosmic forces have in
store. Dice and other gaming equipment are even sacrificed on Hopi
and Zuni altars. As Gabriel says about gambling in these communities, “It is likely that the rites were performed to discover the probable
outcome of human effort, representing a desire to secure the guidance
of the natural powers that dominated humanity.” Various native
games, such as dice or hoop and pole, invoke and elaborate basic
assumptions about the universe, from the nature of causality to the
constant tension between opposing forces. Moreover, the communal
nature of the games fosters identity within the group. Still, the games
are competitive: winning was often seen as a blessing and an assurance of continued order and balance—hence the high stakes and profound meaning of native gambling (medicine men sometimes perform
ceremonies to invoke the aid of spirits in winning). Many native myths
involve gambling, where divine power helps the protagonist win
games of chance over antagonistic opponents. Because these are
sacred rites, tribal members are reluctant to discuss their details. The
Navajo, for example, fear speaking about gambling away from sacred
times and places, lest doing so bring down the wrath of the cosmic
forces (much as they would be loath to casually discuss the Nightway).
In cultures where there is no need for a straight-edge distinction
between the sacred and the secular, practices like gambling both reveal
and maintain profound cultural values and beliefs. Never trivial or
merely parasitic to “real” or “productive” activity, gambling always
conveys deep meaning in native culture.
These traditional associations of gambling are present in contemporary debates over bingo palaces and Indian casinos. Because Indian
Nations are sovereign states, gambling is legal on tribal ground. For
flags in the design of this Apache basket.
[8081] Pomo tribe, Gift basket
(c.1930), courtesy of the Portland Art
Museum, Elizabeth Cole Butler
Collection. The Pomo are a coastal
native group in Sonoma County,
California. The basket is made of willow,
sedge root, clam shell beads, abalone
shell, meadowlark feathers, quail feathers, mallard duck feathers, flicker feathers, and dogbane. Pomo baskets are
known for their spiritual, ceremonial,
and healing properties.
[8118] Plateau Indians, Basketry hat
(c. 1900), courtesy of the Portland Art
Museum, Elizabeth Cole Butler
Collection. Nimíipuu (Nez Perce) women
wore fez-shaped basket hats as part of
their everyday clothing. This hat is made
from vegetal fiber, wool yarn, and a
leather fringe. The Nez Perce were one
of the tribes encountered by Lewis and
Clark during their search for the
Northwest Passage.
[8202] Yokut, Basket (c. 1900), courtesy
of the Portland Art Museum, gift of
Elizabeth Cole Butler. Yokut Indian
women (Central California) learned to
weave at an early age. Baskets were
indispensable to Yokut daily life. Yokut
baskets are known for their ornate
designs, including human figures and
animals. This basket is made of sedge
root, red bud, bracken fern root, grass,
and quail feathers.
Anonymous, Bone Game,
Makah (c. 1900), courtesy of Larry
Johnson and the Washington State
Historical Society.
[6693]
S A C R E D
P L AY
45
William J. Carpenter, Life on the
Plains (1915), courtesy of the Library of
Congress [LC-USZ62-99804].
[1092]
many native communities, such as the Pequot of
Connecticut, casino revenues have led to an economic and hence cultural renaissance. Libraries
and museums as well as educational and language
programs are now available where none existed
before. Critics, however, argue that legalized gambling in any form is merely a way of taxing the poor
and disenfranchised.
Indeed, Indian gambling has long had its detractors. Europeans settlers professed shock when confronted with the intensity of native American gambling. In 1775, Captain Bernard Romans said of a
Choctaw hoop and pole game that it was “plain
proof of the evil consequences of a violent passion
for gaming upon all kinds, classes, and orders of
men.” And indeed, from a Western point of view, the
stakes of native gaming seemed high; traditionally, players would
sometimes continue betting until losing everything they owned (even
including the clothes on their backs), and Captain Romans notes that
several Choctaw committed suicide after such losses. Gambling in
most native cultures is not an idle pastime and certainly is not understood as vice or bad habit. First, it is a very pragmatic way of redistributing goods and food without the bloodshed of fighting or even
war. But more profoundly, gambling is a form of what has been called
“sacred play”; like many aspects of native life, it is inseparable from
spirituality.
T E A C H I N G
S A C R E D
W E B
P L A Y
A R C H I V E
[1092] William J. Carpenter, Life on the
Plains (1915), courtesy of the Library of
Congress [LC-USZ62-99804]. Navajo
and cowboy playing cards. These cards
show the type of interethnic male-male
bonding seen in James Fenimore
Cooper’s novels. Interaction like this
largely died out when white males
started to bring their families to settle
in the West.
[6651] Anonymous, Men Playing a
Game in Subterranean Lodge at Chino
Village (n.d.), courtesy of the John
Carter Brown Library. In what looks not
unlike a ritual or ceremonial formation,
these men are engaged in game-playing
in an underground lodge. In Native
American cultures, gaming is a sacred
activity that in some cases allows the
players to tap into cosmic forces.
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T I P S
■ Although Longfellow based his Song of Hiawatha on Iroquois history and mythology, chapter 16 on the gambler Pau-Puk-Keewis is
based on the Chippewa oral tradition (as collected by Henry
Schoolcraft in the first half of the nineteenth century). Kathryn
Gabriel considers Pau-Puk-Keewis “the nearly perfect archetype of the
destructive Native gambler”; she notes that he is “derived from Pauppu-ke-nay, the Ojibwa/Chippewa trickster grasshopper who has the
ability to shape-shift.” Ask your students to read the excerpt from
Hiawatha in the archive and use it as a backdrop for discussing Native
American Gambler figures and for understanding the characterization
of Fleur in Erdrich’s story.
■ Lawrence Johnson’s 1999 documentary Hand Game is an excellent introduction to traditional Native American gambling practices.
Hand Game looks at eight Indian communities including the Crow,
Spokane, Flathead, and Blackfeet. It investigates the world of bone,
grass, or stick game—the most widely played gambling game in North
America. This video includes interesting interviews with gaming participants and could be usefully paired with stories about gambler figures.
Q U E S T I O N S
Comprehension: Why was gambling important to many Native
American cultures?
Comprehension: What are the main attributes of a gambler figure?
How does Silko’s gambler fit within this paradigm?
Comprehension: Compare gambler and trickster figures.
Comprehension: What is the relationship between the gambler and
the cultural hero?
Context: Why do the men in “Fleur” react so strongly to Fleur
Pillager’s uncanny winning of the game? How do gender politics
and religion operate in the story to provoke the men’s rancor?
Context: Read the Winnebago trickster tale. How does the Winnebago
trickster compare to the gambler? What is the role of each in creating culture?
Context: Compare the depiction of gambling in Leslie Marmon Silko’s
Ceremony and Louise Erdrich’s The Bingo Palace. What role does
the oral tradition of the Pueblo and Chippewa, respectively, play in
each?
Exploration: Imagine that you are an advertising executive who has
been asked to design a campaign to gain acceptance for a new
Indian gambling facility near your community. What rhetoric will
you employ? What claims will you refute?
Exploration: Compare the role of gambling in Leslie Marmon Silko’s
Ceremony to the role of gambling in the high society novels of Edith
Wharton and Henry James (Unit 9). To what extent is gambling in
these novels also about characters’ attempts to control the otherwise unpredictable future? How do their experiences differ?
Anonymous, Bone Game,
Makah (c. 1900), courtesy of Larry
Johnson and the Washington State
Historical Society. This game, called the
“bone game” by the Makah Tribe of the
Pacific Northwest, is often referred to as
the “hand game” or the “stick game.”
The activity is guessing which hand is
holding a piece of bone, but the game
is complex and involves drumming,
singing, and trickery.
[8225] Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,
“Pau-Puk-Keewis,” from The Song of
Hiawatha (1855), courtesy of Ticknor
and Fields, Boston. The sixteenth chapter of Longfellow’s famous Song of
Hiawatha tells the story of the gambler
Pau-Puk-Keewis. Although Longfellow
based this work on Iroquois history and
mythology, Pau-Puk-Keewis comes from
the Chippewa oral tradition.
[6693]
ASSIGNMENTS
Personal and Creative Responses
1. Journal: First, freewrite in your journal on whatever you know
about Native American literature and cultures. Then, write a narrative from the point of view of a person of your own age who has just
encountered Native American culture for the first time. What do
you imagine that person would be thinking? What would he or she
find most memorable? What emotions would he or she be feeling?
What would he or she say to or ask the Native Americans (assuming communication could occur)?
2. Poet’s Corner: Use one of the poems by Tapahonso or Ortiz as a
model for a poem about an experience of your own. What about
this model is helpful to you in expressing yourself? What seems to
interfere or be bothersome? If you have written poems in the past,
“translate” one of them into this form so that it echoes elements of
the oral tradition. How does changing the form of your poem affect
what you understand to be its meaning?
A S S I G N M E N T S
47
3. Doing History: Stage a fictional dialogue between Wovoka, the
Paiute prophet of the Ghost Dance religion, and a thoughtful,
middle-class white person in the Midwest United States, in which
they try to explain themselves to each other. Imagine this exchange
takes place in early 1890, after the Ghost Dance has begun to spread
but before the catastrophe of Wounded Knee. Wovoka is preaching
a peaceful yet clearly anti-white spirituality (read the Wovoka selection in The Norton Anthology of American Literature before you do
this assignment). The white person, sympathetic to human suffering and not prejudiced against Native Americans, is both anxious
about the subversive potential of the Ghost Dance and unavoidably
implicated in the society that has nearly decimated native culture.
What can these two people say to each other that might build a
bridge between them?
4. Multimedia: As Paula Gunn Allen says in the video, virtually all
objects and practices in traditional American Indian life are “messages”: “content-laden information that you can read.” Using the
American Passages image database, construct a multimedia presentation in which you analyze the images of such items as pottery,
baskets, sandpaintings, masks, and dances. What “argument” about
their culture do they seem to be making? In what sense can these
objects or practices be seen as messages, indicating the values or
beliefs of the culture that produced them?
Problem-Based Learning Projects
1. You are a United States congressperson in 1924, speaking in favor
of the act to grant citizenship to American Indians. Using texts and
cultural artifacts from at least three different communities, prepare
a presentation for Congress using images as well as testimony on
why American Indians deserve to be full citizens.
2. You are a spokesperson for a museum that has been asked to return
to a local tribe the five-hundred-year-old human bones and burial
objects in its collection. What will the museum do with these
objects if they aren’t returned? How should the museum present
information about Native American cultures if it doesn’t use the
burial objects? Help design a new exhibit for the museum.
3. You are part of a team charged with composing a new American
history textbook for high school students. You have been asked to
provide a brief sketch of the effects of European colonialism on
Native American culture. How would you write such a sketch?
Where would you want your reader to feel sympathy, anger, frustration, satisfaction? What is our current responsibility toward evaluating the actions of people in the past? Are the Europeans the bad
guys? Are the Indians the good guys? Should our judgments be
more complicated? Is there reason to believe any of us would have
acted more ethically had we been alive four hundred years ago?
Consider, as you write, that your audience will consist of readers
from European as well as Indian backgrounds.
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GLOSSARY
bicultural production A text or object that retains the nature of
the creator’s original culture as well as influences from other cultures.
creation stories American Indian narratives of how the world or
the tribe began. The biblical book of Genesis also contains two creation stories, but Native American creation stories tend to emphasize
the number four, the humanlike nature of the original gods, a race of
proto-humans, the essential connectedness of all creation, and the
centrality of the tribe in question to the cosmic order.
cultural hero stories Stories involving a hero who is human or
has human characteristics and works on behalf of a community. These
stories help dramatize the native people’s belief about how the original
world was altered to its current form.
emergence stories Stories that describe how the people originated in the womb of the Earth Mother and were called to the surface
by Sun Father. Despite the many differences among various tribes’ versions of these stories, they generally establish how the world was created; how people developed out of ambiguously formed beings (who
often had both animal and human characteristics); what each tribe
took to be the basic relationships among people and between people
and nature; and the origins of important tribal customs and structures.
emergent religion A religion in which new spiritual practices are
added to an existing framework.
gynocratic Governed by women, as opposed to patriarchal,
meaning governed by men. American Indian communities such as the
Pueblos were matrilineal (i.e., traced their descent through the maternal line) and/or matrifocal (female-centered).
hózhó A Navajo term meaning holiness, harmony, or beauty. This
term is used to describe Navajo art, song, and ritual that seeks balance
and harmony.
manitos Extremely powerful beings in the Chippewa cosmology
who could be characterized as “spirits” or gods. Manitos provided
people with food (through hunting) and good health. They include
Pau-Puk-Keewis, the Chippewa gambler, windigos, Nanabozho (the
Chippewa cultural hero/trickster), and the underwater manito.
oral tradition The tradition of songs, stories, chants, and performances that comprised pre-Columbian Native American literature
(actually “traditions,” for each community had its own set of traditions). “Literature” is problematic here, however, insofar as these cultural events were never written down, frequently sacred, and always
community building. Many contemporary Native American writers
employ themes and structures from the oral tradition in order to keep
those traditions alive.
performative One or more words that have immediate, concrete
effects in the world. In the West, phrases such as “I now pronounce
you husband and wife” or “Case dismissed” are examples of performative utterances. For many Indian cultures, much of the oral tradition
was inherently performative—for example, it was used to cure or to
invoke the spirits.
G LO S S A R Y
49
tale-types Groups of stories that tend to focus on particular
characters and include standard events and elements. Some of the
most common tale-types include Gambler, Trickster, Creation, Abduction, Migration, and Women’s stories. Contemporary authors can
use these tale-types in their works: for example, Leslie Marmon Silko’s
Ceremony retells Yellow Woman stories—a Pueblo Abduction cycle.
trickster A common Native American legendary figure, usually
male, but occasionally female or disguised in female form, and notorious for exaggerated biological drives and well-endowed physique.
Partly divine, partly human, and partly animal, he is an often amoral
and a comic troublemaker. Because stories about Trickster often represent him as transgressing cultural mores, they serve to explain and
investigate the origins and values of those mores.
Yellow Woman stories Told by the Pueblo peoples of the
Southwest, these stories dramatize how humans interact with spirits
in the world once it has been created. Although there is always variation, Yellow Woman stories often involve a young married woman who
wanders beyond her village and has a sexual encounter with a spiritman; sometimes she is killed, but usually she returns to her family and
tribe having grown spiritually, and therefore exerts an empowering
influence on the people in general.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Allen, Paula Gunn. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in
American Indian Traditions. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992.
Babcock, Barbara A., Guy Monthan, and Doris Monthan. The Pueblo
Storyteller: Development of a Figurative Ceramic Tradition. Tucson:
U of Arizona P, 1986.
Deloria, Vine Jr. God Is Red: A Native View of Religion. 2nd ed. Golden:
Fulcrum Publishing, 1992.
Faris, James C. The Nightway: A History and a History of Documentation of a Navajo Ceremonial. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P,
1990.
Gabriel, Kathryn. Gambler Way: Indian Gaming in Mythology, History,
and Archaeology in North America. Boulder: Johnson Books, 1996.
Harjo, Joy, and Gloria Bird, eds. Reinventing the Enemy’s Language:
Contemporary Native Women’s Writings of North America. New
York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1997.
Hynes, Williams J., and William G. Doty, eds. Mythical Trickster
Figures: Contours, Contexts, and Criticisms. Tuscaloosa: U of
Alabama P, 1993.
Sarris, Greg. Keeping Slug Woman Alive: A Holistic Approach to
American Indian Texts. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993.
———. Mabel McKay: Weaving the Dream. Berkeley: U of California P,
1994.
Schlick, Mary Dodds. Columbia River Basketry: Gifts of the Ancestors,
Gifts of the Earth. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1994.
50
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Schubnell, Matthias, ed. Conversations with N. Scott Momaday.
Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1997.
Swann, Brian, ed. Smoothing the Ground: Essays on Native American
Oral Literature. Berkeley: U of California P, 1983.
Vecsey, Christopher. Traditional Ojibwa Religion and Its Historical
Changes. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1983.
FURTHER RESOURCES
American Indian Music of the Southwest. Folkways Records, 1951.
Bates, Sara (curator), Jolene Rickard, and Paul Chaat Smith. Indian
Humor: American Indian Contemporary Arts. San Francisco:
American Indian Contemporary Arts, 1995.
Horse Capture, Joseph D., and George P. Horse Capture. Beauty,
Honor and Tradition: The Legacy of Plains Indian Shirts. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2001.
Incident at Oglala: The Leonard Peltier Story. Directed by Michael
Apted. Miramax Films, 1992.
Leslie Marmon Silko: A Film By Matteo Bellinelli. TSI Swiss Television,
2000.
Lovett, John R. Jr., and Donald L. DeWitt. Guide to Native American
Ledger Drawings and Pictographs in United States Museums,
Libraries, and Archives. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1998.
Moffitt, John F., and Santiago Sebastián. O Brave New People: The
European Invention of the American Indian. Albuquerque: U of
New Mexico P, 1996.
Monroe, Dan L., et al. (curators). Gifts of the Spirit: Works by
Nineteenth-Century and Contemporary Native American Artists.
Salem: Peabody Essex Museum, 1996.
Phillips, Ruth B. Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North
American Art from the Northeast, 1700–1900. Seattle: U of
Washington P, 1998.
Rushing, W. Jackson III, ed. Native American Art in the Twentieth
Century: Makers, Meanings, Histories. New York: Routledge, 1999.
Winds of Change. A Matter of Promises. Narrated by N. Scott Momaday.
Wisconsin Public Television. PBS Video, 1990.
F U R T H E R
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